The management of large flows of connectionless traffic on the basis of self-similar modeling

Fluctuations of aggregated connectionless traffic are modelled with the fractional Brownian motion. The applicability and interpretation of the self-similar model are studied both by comparison with Ethernet traffic data from Bellcore and conceptually, defining an ideal notion of free traffic. An insight into the three model parameters is obtained by finding their counterparts in a burst model with heavy-tailed burst length distribution. A bandwidth allocation formula based on the corresponding queueing system is discussed. Guidelines for short-term traffic prediction are found using an exact formula for the conditional expectation of a future value given the past. Directions for further study are indicated at the end of each section