A comparison of methods for estimating the tail index of heavy-tailed Internet traffic

Many researchers have discussed the effects of heavy-tailedness in network traffic patterns and shown that Internet traffic flows exhibit characteristics of self-similarity that can be explained by the heavy-tailedness of the various distributions involved. Self-similarity and heavy-tailedness are of great importance for network capacity planning purposes in which researchers are interested in developing analytical methods for analysing traffic characteristics. Designers of computing and telecommunication systems are increasingly interested in employing heavy-tailed distributions to generate workloads for use in simulation although simulations employing such workloads may show unusual characteristics. In this paper, we describe some of the most useful mechanisms for estimating the tail index, particularly for distributions having the power law observed in different contexts in the Internet.