| Recent measurements of network traffic have shown that self-similarity
is an ubiquitous phenomenon present in both local area and wide
area networks. In previous work, we have shown a simple, robust
application layer causal mechanism of traffic self-similarity,
namely, the transfer of objects or files in a generic network system
where the file size distributions are heavytailed. In this paper,
we study the effect of scale-invariant burstiness on network
performance when the protocol stack and the interaction of traffic
sources sharing bounded network resources are incorporated. First,
we present a framework for understanding the two principal performance
implications of self-similar traffic---concentrated periods of
congestion and amplified packet loss/queueing delay. Using performance
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