Ambiguities in estimates of critical exponents for long-range dependent processes

In this article, we show that the Hurst parameter and a well-known wavelet estimator fail to distinguish on/off models with substantially different distributions of on-times. We identify the problem as arising when standard power spectrum techniques, which are well-defined for commonly considered processes, are applied to processes with extremely heavy tailed on-times. We provide an elementary mechanism whereby such extremely heavy-tailed on-time processes arise in a simple queuing model.