Conservative cascades: an invariant of Internet traffic

Conservative cascades are among the class of multiscaling processes that accommodate the two competing objectives of deterministic and random cascades. This paper discusses in what sense the cascade model can be seen as an invariant of the Internet traffic. It explains why conservative cascades model the time-invariant properties of the Internet traffic at timescales up to hundreds of milliseconds. Furthermore, it shows the limitations of the conservative cascades to model part of the time-dependent scaling properties of Internet traffic.