Measurement and analysis of long-range dependent behavior of Internet packet delay

We analyze 12 traces of round-trip Internet packet delay. We find that these traces, when viewed as time series data, often exhibit Hurst parameter (H) estimates greater than 0.5, indicating long-range dependence. Several traces, however, are not well-modeled with a constant H. We discuss in detail our analytical methods and the robustness of empirical estimators of H under conditions of non-negligible packet loss. Our results indicate that Internet delay is bursty across multiple time scales, which implies that end-user duality of service in the Internet is likely to be impacted by long periods of very large and/or highly variable delays