A critical look at power law modelling of the Internet

This paper takes a critical look at the usefulness of power law models of the Internet. The twin focuses of the paper are Internet traffic and topology generation. The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly it summarises the state of the art in power law modelling particularly giving attention to existing open research questions. Secondly it provides insight into the failings of such models and where progress needs to be made for power law research to feed through to actual improvements in network performance.Comment: To appear Computer Communication

Tricritical directed percolation

We consider a modification of the contact process incorporating higher-order reaction terms. The original contact process exhibits a non-equilibrium phase transition belonging to the universality class of directed percolation. The incorporated higher-order reaction terms lead to a non-trivial phase diagram. In particular, a line of continuous phase transitions is separated by a tricritical point from a line of discontinuous phase transitions. The corresponding tricritical scaling behavior is analyzed in detail, i.e., we determine the critical exponents, various universal scaling functions as well as universal amplitude combinations

Self-generated Self-similar Traffic

Self-similarity in the network traffic has been studied from several aspects: both at the user side and at the network side there are many sources of the long range dependence. Recently some dynamical origins are also identified: the TCP adaptive congestion avoidance algorithm itself can produce chaotic and long range dependent throughput behavior, if the loss rate is very high. In this paper we show that there is a close connection between the static and dynamic origins of self-similarity: parallel TCPs can generate the self-similarity themselves, they can introduce heavily fluctuations into the background traffic and produce high effective loss rate causing a long range dependent TCP flow, however, the dropped packet ratio is low.Comment: 8 pages, 12 Postscript figures, accepted in Nonlinear Phenomena in Complex System

The Dynamics of Internet Traffic: Self-Similarity, Self-Organization, and Complex Phenomena

The Internet is the most complex system ever created in human history. 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, large-scale effects of worm traffic, and comparisons of the Internet and biological models will be covered.Comment: 63 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables, submitted to Advances in Complex System

Thermodynamical behavior of the Blume-Capel model in the vicinity of its tricritical point

We investigate the thermodynamic properties of the zero-field Blume-Capel model in the vicinity of its tricritical point (TCP). We calculate the quadrupole moment, internal energy, and entropy densities employing an exact numerical recursion procedure for the model defined on a hierarchical lattice of fractal dimension $d$. We explore the scaling behavior of the isothermal quadrupolar susceptibility and, the isothermal and constant crystal-field specific heat as a function of the temperature and the reduced crystal-field parameter along the ferromagnetic and the \emph{ordered paramagnetic} phase frontier. Results achieved for systems with dimensions $d=2$ and $3$ exhibit the main features of the continuous and first-order transitions in the TCP neighborhoods. We also probe the phase coexistence in the $\lambda$-diagram and the latent heat in the vicinity of the tricritical point locus.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figure