Does the Internet Still Demonstrate Fractal Nature?

Abstract

The self-similar nature of bursty Internet traffic has been investigated for the last decade. A first generation of papers, approximately from 1994 to 2004, argued that the traditionally used Poisson models oversimplified the characteristics of network traffic and were not appropriate for modeling bursty, local-area, and wide-area network traffic. Since 2004, a second generation of papers has challenged the suitability of these results in networks of the new century and has claimed that the traditional Poisson-based and other models are still more appropriate for characterizing today’s Internet traffic. A possible explanation was that as the speed and amount of Internet traffic grow spectacularly, any irregularity of the network traffic, such as self-similarity, might cancel out as a consequence of high-speed optical connections, new communications protocols, and the vast number of multiplexed flows. These papers analyzed traffic traces of Internet backbone collected in 2003. In one of our previous papers we applied the theory of smoothly truncated Levy flights and the linear fractal model in examining the variability of Internet traffic from self-similar to Poisson. We demonstrated that the series of interarrival times was still close to a self-similar process, but the burstiness of the packet lengths decreased significantly compared to earlier traces. Since then, new traffic traces have been made public, including ones captured from the Internet backbone in 2008. In this paper we analyze these traffic traces and apply our new analytical methods to illustrate the tendency of Internet traffic burstiness. Ultimately, we attempt to answer the question: Does the Internet still demonstrate fractal nature?