Understanding the long-term self-similarity of Internet traffic

This paper analyzes the characteristics of Internet traffic by studying a six days long trace of the entire interdomain traffic received by an ISP. Our study shows that this traffic is self-similar at timescales spanning minutes to hours. We show that this self-similarity could be explained by two factors. First, the traffic volume from each external source exhibits a heavy-tailed distribution. Second, the number of these external sources is also self-similar. Finally, we show that self-similar traffic can be simulated by users transferring exponentially distributed traffic provided that the number of users is self-similar.