Scaling analysis of the internet traffic structural dynamics

Internet traffic structurally consists of sessions, flows and packets; and traverses through different tiers of service providers during its end-to-end journey. We address the phenomena of Scaling (second-order) exhibited by Internet traffic in this paper. Understanding this Scaling behavior is important because: for the lower time scales it can affect queuing, buffering or switching performance; and, for the higher time scales where it is relevant for network dimensioning and bandwidth provisioning. We present a unified analysis describing Scaling in different structural components of Internet traffic (sessions. flows and packets) and also their sensitivity as traffic moves from access to core network.