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

TL;DR

This paper reviews the complex dynamics of Internet traffic, highlighting phenomena like self-similarity, self-organization, and oscillations, from both engineering and physics perspectives, and compares Internet behavior to biological models.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of Internet traffic dynamics, integrating insights from network engineering and physics, and covers less-studied phenomena like worm traffic effects and biological model comparisons.

Findings

Internet traffic exhibits self-similarity and complex oscillations.

Large-scale worm traffic significantly impacts network behavior.

Comparisons with biological models offer new insights into Internet dynamics.

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.