the long term. With self-similar traffic, the bursty behaviour may itself be bursty, which exacerbates the clustering phenomena, and degrades network performance. Many aspects of network quality of service depend on coping with traffic peaks that might cause network failures, such as Cell/packet loss and queue overflow Violation of delay bounds e.g. in video Worst cases in statistical multiplexing Poisson processes are well-behaved because they are stateless, and peak loading is not sustained, so queues do not fill. With long-range order, peaks last longer and have greater impact: the equilibrium shifts for a while. See also Long-tail traffic References External links A site offering numerous links to articles written on the effect of self-similar traffic on network performance. Teletraffic Autocorrelation