THE DYNAMICS OF INTERNET TRAFFIC: SELF-SIMILARITY, SELF-ORGANIZATION, AND COMPLEX PHENOMENA

The Internet is one of the largest and most complex communication and information exchange networks ever created. 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, BGP storms, and comparisons of the Internet and biological models will be covered.