We investigate the approximating capability of Markov modulated Poisson processes (MMPP) for modeling multifractal Internet traffic. The choice of MMPP is motivated by its ability to capture the variability and correlation in moderate time scales while being analytically tractable. Important statistics of traffic burstiness are described and a customized moment-based fitting procedure of MMPP to traffic traces is presented. Our methodology of doing this is to examine whether the MMPP can be used to predict the performance of a queue to which MMPP sample paths and measured traffic traces are fed for comparison respectively, in addition to the goodness-of-fit test of MMPP. Numerical results and simulations show that the fitted MMPP can approximate multifractal traffic quite well, i.e. accurately predict the queueing performance.
