A sampling technique for variance estimation of long-range dependent traffic

Due to the long-range dependence of Internet traffic, the sampling distribution of the variance is very hard to obtain and, as a result, confidence intervals cannot be provided. Nevertheless, we show that the r-decimated variance sampling distribution can be approximated by a χ² distribution. This sampling technique can be used to provide a confidence interval for the variance, with significant benefits for many applications in Internet dimensioning, traffic forecasting and control.