The objective of this paper is to introduce self-similarity as a fundamental property exhibited by the bursty traffic behavior between different on-chip modules in typical MPEG-2 video applications. Statistical tests performed on relevant traces extracted from common video clips establish unequivocally the existence of self-similarity in on-chip video traffic. Using a generic on-chip communication architecture, we discuss the implications of our findings on on-chip buffer space allocation. We also describe a synthetic trace generation procedure for speeding up the buffer simulation process. 1