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 quality of service in the Internet is likely to be impacted by long periods of very large and/or highly variable delays. 1 Introduction It is now widely accepted that network traffic exhibits longrange dependence (LRD). While the practical implications of this discovery are not yet completely understood, it is known that traditional Poisson models of network traffic cannot capture the behavior of LRD traffic. Often LRD data is also selfsimilar, indicating that it pos..