On catastrophic nature of network performance degradation induced by traffic correlations

Although it is evident that traffic correlations may have significant performance impacts on networks, it is still not clear how correlated traffic may deteriorate network performance. This paper demonstrates the catastrophic nature of network performance degradation induced by traffic correlations, that is, as long as the correlation time is large enough, bistability may appear in network behavior, which may cause the network to change abruptly from one stable state to another. This catastrophic behavior may have significant impacts on traffic control and engineering