title: Self-organized criticality in a computer network model
abstract: We study the collective behavior of computer network nodes by using a cellular automaton model. The results show that when the load of network is constant, the throughputs and buffer contents of nodes are power-law distributed in both space and time. Also the feature of 1/f noise appears in the power spectrum of the change of the number of nodes that bear a fixed part of the system load. It can be seen as yet another example of self-organized criticality. Power-law decay in the distribution of buffer contents implies that heavy network congestion occurs with small probability. The temporal power-law distribution for throughput might be a reasonable explanation for the observed self-similarity in computer network traffic.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Shan