On Scaling Phenomena in Internet Traffic

Walter Willinger, walter@research.att.com, AT&T Labs-Research 180 Park Ave. C284, Florham Park, NJ 07932

After a brief summary of what we have learned in the past 5+ years about the Internet and the traffic that it carries, I will discuss three recent developments related to improving our still rather incomplete understanding of data network traffic: Explaining the self-similar or fractal nature of Internet traffic, the emergence of wavelet techniques for analyzing network traffic measurements, and finally the observed multifractal scaling behavior of measured Internet traces over small time scales.