Characteristics of the Internet traffic data flow are studied based on the chaos theory. A phase space that is isometric with the network dynamic system is reconstructed by using the single variable time series of a network flow. Some parameters, such as the correlative dimension and the Lyapunov exponent are calculated, and the chaos characteristic is proved to exist in Internet traffic data flows. A neural network model is construct- ed based on radial basis function （RBF） to forecast actual Internet traffic data flow. Simulation results show that, compared with other forecasts of the forward-feedback neural network, the forecast of the RBF neural network based on the chaos theory has faster learning capacity and higher forecasting accuracy.
