Résumé:
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 selfsimilar 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?
