Self-similarity in bottleneck buffers

We analyze a model of a heavily utilized bottleneck buffer in this paper. We show that the nature of traffic leaving the buffer is determined by the buffer length/number of TCP ratio. If this ratio is above a critical value, TCP can stay in the congestion avoidance phase and it can generate periodic traffic after a transient period. If the ratio is below a critical value then the congestion window dynamics becomes chaotic or stochastic. We demonstrate that the traffic shows self-similar properties in this chaotic phase, which is determined by the exponential backoff mechanism