Characterization of Internet Traffic S-38.149 Postgraduate Course in Teletraffic Theory

The aim of this paper is to give an overview of traffic seen in Internet and what kind of models can be used to describe it. The traffic in Internet is an aggregate of traffic from many local area networks (LAN). Measurement results strongly suggest that the traffic is self-similar with huge variation of timescales, from order of milliseconds to even days. This report is based mostly on ten articles written during the years 1991-1999. The most of the articles consider the measurement and analysis of local area network traffic, what goes wrong with traditional models (Poisson) and how well self-similar processes model the traffic. Also the traffic caused by world wide web is analyzed individually.