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Scaling Offered Load

One of the key requirements of traffic generation is the ability to scale the offered load, i.e., to generate a wide range of link loads with the same model of application behavior. This makes it possible to evaluate the performance of a network mechanism under various loads, which translates into different degrees of congestion, while preserving the same application mix. For example, the evaluation of AQM mechanism in [CJOS00,LAJS03] compared the performance of FIFO to RED and other AQM mechanisms for loads between 50% to 110% of a link's capacity where the queuing mechanism was used. In these studies, the authors preceded their study by a set of calibration experiments. These experiments were used to derive an expression for the linear dependency between the number of (web) user equivalents and the average offered load, which enabled the researchers to systematically scale offered loads in their evaluation experiments. Calibration is generally applicable to any application-level model. When calibrating, the researchers try to relate one or more parameters of the model and the average offered load to obtain a calibration function. Deriving a calibration function is a time-consuming process, since an entire collection of experiments must be run to correlate offered load and model parameters with confidence.

Kamath et al. [KcLH$^+$02] studied load scaling methods, but they concentrated only on scaling up the offered load. Their intention was to conduct experiments with much higher offered loads than those observed during measurement. In particular, they considered the problem of generating traffic for loading a 1 Gbps link using only measurements from a 10 Mbps link, an 11-hour packet header trace. The authors considered three different techniques. The first two techniques involved a transformation of the original trace into a scaled-up version, and then a packet-level replay. The first transformation technique was packet arrival scaling, which scales up the load by multiplying the arrival time of each packet in the original trace by a constant factor between 0 and 1 (i.e.,,shrinking packet inter-arrivals). In their study, they used a scaling factor of 0.001. The second transformation technique is trace merging, which scales up load by merging, i.e., superimposing, the packet arrivals from more than one trace. They divided the 11-hour trace into 100 subtraces and then combined them to form a shorter, higher-throughput trace. The third technique is structural modeling which meant to develop a web traffic model from the original trace using the methods in Smith et al. [SHCJO01]. The authors did not discuss how the load created by this structural model was increased. Their analysis compared a number of distributions from the generated traces to those from the original trace. Packet arrival scaling was shown to completely distort flow durations and destination address diversity. Trace merging reproduced flow and packet arrival properties accurately, but it distorted destination address characteristics (studied using the number of unique addresses observed per unit of time). Web traffic generation was accurate, but it showed far less complex distributions of connection bytes, packet sizes, and connection durations. This is because a structural model based only on web traffic lacks the diversity of application behavior, and therefore communication patterns, in the original trace, which included traffic from many different applications and not just web traffic.


next up previous contents
Next: Implementing Traffic Generation Up: Related Work Previous: Source-Level Traffic Generation   Contents

Doctoral Dissertation: Generation and Validation of Empirically-Derived TCP Application Workloads
© 2006 Félix Hernández-Campos