Congestion Control for Self-Similar Network Traffic.

Recent measurements of local-area and wide-area traffic have shown that network traffic exhibits variability at a wide range of scales. What is striking is the ubiquitousness of the phenomenon, which has been observed in diverse networking contexts, from Ethernet to ATM, LAN and WAN, compressed video, and HTTP-based WWW traffic. Such scale-invariant variability is in strong contrast to traditional models of network traffic, which show burstiness at short time scales but are essentially smooth at large time scales; that is, they lack long-range dependence. Since scale-invariant burstiness can exert a significant impact on network performance, understanding the causes and effects of traffic self-similarity is an important problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]