Self-similarity in wide-area network traffic

The seemingly insatiable demand for more bandwidth required by the latest applications and the constantly increasing volume of the overall traffic in today's networks are often cited as one of the main forces behind the success and rapid deployment of optical network technology. While much has been written about the quantity of the traffic that these networks are expected to carry, the nature or quality of this traffic has been more of a puzzle, if not mystery, especially in view of recently discovered scaling properties (i.e., self-similarity, fractals, power laws) in measured network traffic. By explaining the empirically observed scaling phenomena in the networking context, we provide a plausible answer to this quality-related puzzle and illustrate how this new understanding of the qualitative nature of modern network traffic can be used to predict the likely dynamics of traffic flows in future optical networks running at Giga/Terabit speeds.