The Identification and Performance Analysis of the Fractal Characteristics of Network Traffic

Network traffic has single-fractal characteristic, or self-similar characteristic, at the global time scale; and multi-fractal characteristic at local time scale. The linear or nonlinear relationship between the scaling function and the time scale can be used to determine the single-fractal or multi-fractal characteristic of the network traffic. Increasing the buffer size will reduce the packet loss rate and network delay with single-fractal and multi-fractal traffic as input, but the network delay and delay jitter will significantly increase. This phenomena of multi-fractal traffic is serous than that of the single-fractal. The reason is that the multi-fractal can characterize not only the long-range dependence properties of network traffic, but also the sudden change at the small-scale.