The Dynamics of Internet Traffic: Self-Similarity, Self-Organization, and Complex Phenomena

Abstract

The Internet is the most complex system ever created in human history. Therefore, its dynamics and traffic unsurprisingly take on a rich variety of complex dynamics, self-organization, and other phenomena that have been researched for years. This paper is a review of the complex dynamics of Internet traffic. Departing from normal treatises, we will take a view from both the network engineering and physics perspectives showing the strengths and weaknesses as well as insights of both. In addition, many less covered phenomena such as traffic oscillations, large-scale effects of worm traffic, and comparisons of the Internet and biological models will be covered.

63 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables, submitted to Advances in Complex Systems

References in corpus (7)

• Efficient routing on complex networks
• Dynamics of jamming transitions in complex networks
• Integrating static and dynamic information for routing traffic
• Transport on Complex Networks: Flow, Jamming and Optimization
• The Workshop on Internet Topology (WIT) Report
• The effect of bandwidth in scale-free network traffic
• Long-term power-law fluctuation in Internet traffic

Cited by in corpus (4)

• A framework for the direct evaluation of large deviations in non-Markovian processes
• Preliminaries on the Accurate Estimation of the Hurst Exponent Using Time Series
• Temporally correlated zero-range process with open boundaries: Steady state and fluctuations
• Network heterogeneity and node capacity lead to heterogeneous scaling of fluctuations in random walks on graphs