The Fractal Nature of Internet Traffic

The internet is a complex digital environment that has grown to an immense complexity. With a relatively small number of major nodes leading to a larger number of medium-size nodes, to an immense number of small nodes, the recursive sturcture of the net is at least plausible. We shall see it is more than just plausible, and that the fractal nature of the net has design implications.
First we describe some of the basic features of voice traffic.
Next we consider some of the basic differences between voice traffic and data traffic.
Treating data traffic like voice traffic led to some of the early problems with the net.
Data traffice has fractal characteristics, requiring different design parameters than voice traffic networks.