Performance impacts of multi-scaling in wide area TCP/IP traffic

Recent measurement and simulation studies have revealed that wide area network traffic has complex statistical, possibly multifractal, characteristics on short timescales, and is self-similar on long timescales. In this paper, using measured TCP traces and queueing simulations, we show that the fine timescale features can affect performance substantially at low and intermediate utilizations, while the coarse timescale self-similarity is important at intermediate and high utilizations. We outline an analytical method for estimating performance for traffic that is self-similar on coarse timescales and multi-fractal on fine timescales, and show that the engineering problem of setting safe operating points for planning or admission control can be significantly affected by fine timescale fluctuations in network traffic.