Variable heavy tailed durations in Internet traffic. Part I. Understanding heavy tails

The paper is part of a larger paper (see Hernandez-Campos, F. et al., http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/dirt/proj/marron/VarHeavyTails, 2002) that studies the tails of the duration distribution of Internet data flows, and their "heaviness". Data analysis motivates the concepts of moderate, far and extreme tails for understanding the richness of information available in the data. The analysis also motivates a notion of "variable tail index", which leads to a generalization of existing theory for heavy tail durations leading to long range dependence. The emphasis here is on understanding heavy tails.