Merging and splitting self-similar traffic

Traffic measurements in corporate LANs, VBR video sources, ISDN control channels, and other communication systems, have indicated traffic behavior of self-similar nature, which have implications for the design, control and analysis of high-speed networks. Merging and splitting are two basic networking operations and should be studied before we analyze the performance of entire high-speed networks. We give the necessary and sufficient conditions for merging of self-similar traffic streams that also results in a self-similar stream, and show that splitting traffic streams of the self-similar stream are still self-similar streams by the independent splitting operation.