Abstract
Different routing strategies may result in different behaviour of traffic on internet. We analyse the correlation of traffic data for three typical routing strategies by the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and find that the degree of correlation of the data can be divided into three regions, i.e. weak, medium, and strong correlation. The DFA scalings are constants in both the regions of weak and strong correlations but monotonically increase in the region of medium correlation. We suggest that it is better to consider the traffic on complex network as three phases, i.e. the free, buffer, and congestion phase, than just as two phases believed before, i.e. the free and congestion phase.