Self-organized criticality in one-dimensional packet flow model

Packet flow affects the behavior of Internet routers, which in return regulates the flow. Even a non-correlated uniform packet flow from a terminal will be modulated to show correlated fluctuations by going through the network nodes. In this paper, we study a simple model in an abstract level to describe intuitively the self-organized criticality in packet level, the emergence of collective behavior of packets, which causes the long-range dependence of congestion in computer networks. We find that the character of the jam lifetime is consistent with the measurement results, the packet delivery time appears the feature of 1/f noise, and the intervals between the packet arrivals are power-law distributed.