Given that real world systems that exhibit fractal behaviors can now often be modelled mathematically, do you know of anyone who has attempted to apply such fractal models to Internet traffic?
Self-similar traffic patterns are hard to work with (and were discovered only recently). For one, inter-arrival times in self-similar stream have infinite variance. That sure screws up a lot of math generally used in queueing theory. It is also hard to generate (there are no known efficient methods of producing self-similar streams) and stochastical models using it are not reliable (infinite variance again).
When designing protocols do researchers take this fractal nature into account?
Researchers do not design things. They smash things and watch what resulting particles do :) On a more serious note, at least there are some indications of what will NOT work with fractal traffic. Packet shredding for example.
I suppose the second question would be somewhat moot if there is not yet an accepted fractal model to math the Internet...
It is still a research topic, to a large extent. There are results to the effect that even connection arrival processes are self-similar and not Poisson as was previously thought, which may mean that connection oriented schemes like ATM will go bust in large-scale networks. --vadim