Towards Ideal Network Traffic Measurement: A Statistical Algorithmic Approach

Show full item record

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1853/19821

Title: Towards Ideal Network Traffic Measurement: A Statistical Algorithmic Approach
Author: Zhao, Qi
Abstract: With the emergence of computer networks as one of the primary platforms of communication, and with their adoption for an increasingly broad range of applications, there is a growing need for high-quality network traffic measurements to better understand, characterize and engineer the network behaviors. Due to the inherent lack of fine-grained measurement capabilities in the original design of the Internet, it does not have enough data or information to compute or even approximate some traffic statistics such as traffic matrices and per-link delay. While it is possible to infer these statistics from indirect aggregate measurements that are widely supported by network measurement devices (e.g., routers), how to obtain the best possible inferences is often a challenging research problem. We name this as "too little data" problem after its root cause. Interestingly, while "too little data" is clearly a problem, "too much data" is not a blessing either. With the rapid increase of network link speeds, even to keep sampled summarized network traffic (for inferring various network statistics) at low sample rates results in too much data to be stored, processed, and transmitted over measurement devices. In summary high-quality measurements in today's Internet is very challenging due to resource limitations and lack of built-in support, manifested as either "too little data" or "too much data". We present some new practices and proposals to alleviate these two problems.The contribution is four fold: i) designing universal methodologies towards ideal network traffic measurements; ii) providing accurate estimations for several critical traffic statistics guided by the proposed methodologies; iii) offering multiple useful and extensible building blocks which can be used to construct a universal network measurement system in the future; iv) leading to some notable mathematical results such as a new large deviation theorem that finds applications in various areas.
Type: Dissertation
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1853/19821
Date: 2007-10-03
Publisher: Georgia Institute of Technology
Subject: Network measurements
Traffic analysis
Data streaming
Performance evaluation
Statistics counter
Computer networks
Routing (Computer network management)
Inference
Network performance (Telecommunication)
Streaming technology (Telecommunications)
Telecommunication Traffic
Department: Computing
Advisor: Committee Chair: Xu, Jun; Committee Member: Ammar, Mostafa; Committee Member: Feamster, Nick; Committee Member: Ma, Xiaoli; Committee Member: Zegura, Ellen
Degree: Ph.D.

Items in SMARTech are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Files in this item

Files Size Format View
Zhao_Qi_200712_PhD.pdf 1.558Mb PDF View/ Open

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show full item record