Abstract
A packet switched network such as the Internet provides only the best-effort service for users. Recent studies for the characterisitics of the packet arrival on the packet switched network have shown a self-similar property with a long-range dependence, and also show the heavy-tailed distribution. This paper investigates the end-to-end performance of the Internet empirically. It focuses on the inter-arrival process of packets and the property of the packet loss between end-to-end hosts. We show that both the inter-arrival process and loss events have self-similar with a long-range dependence property. The inter-arrival process of packets has the heavy-tailed distribution which sums up the difference of all queues in intermediate routers.