Good news about heavy tails [network traffic]

Heavy-tailed distributions have been widely found in traffic characteristics like connection volumes or connection durations in today's data networks. The purpose of this paper is to show that these heavy-tailed distributions, besides the well-known undesirable features like producing self-similar, long-range dependent traffic, also exhibit desirable features in some cases. Two such cases are presented here: (1) the detection of flows in network traffic, making it possible to determine the right point in time to establish a shortcut connection for a flow. (2) the dimensioning of dial-in access servers where the blocking probability is actually reduced when the holding time variance increases.