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Flexible Traffic Generation

The final problem that we considered in this work was how to introduce controlled variability in network experiments, i.e., how to derive from a trace of connection vectors a new trace that still ``resembles'' the original one. Our solution involves resampling entire connection vectors, fully preserving observed source-level behavior, and assigning them new start times. We gave two methods for this assignment: sampling from an exponential distributions, which results in Poisson connection arrivals, and sampling blocks of connections, which preserves the long-range dependence in the connection arrival process that we encountered in our traces. The first method, Poisson Resampling, is analytically appealing, and supported by empirical data, since the marginal distribution of connection inter-arrival is consistent with an exponential distributions. Block Resampling provides a non-parametric alternative, which is more realistic with regards to the dependency structure of the connection arrival process. This structure did not show any effect on packet and byte arrivals, but it seems important for mechanisms that require per-connection state.

We also showed that our resampling methods can be carefully directed to produce a new trace of connection vectors whose offered traffic load matches an arbitrary target very closely. Such trace scaling is a common requirement in suites of experiments that must expose a network mechanism to a range of traffic loads. The key to our solution is to count the total amount of data in the resamplings, which was shown to be strongly correlated to offered load. On the contrary, our results clearly showed that the number of connections is only weakly correlated to offered load, and cannot be used for accurate scaling of resamplings. While this result is an intuitive consequence of the heavy-tailness in the amount of data carried by connections, the issue has been poorly understood in earlier models, where the parameters that can be controlled to tune offered load were associated with the number of connections. This is for example the case for the number of user equivalents in web traffic models. The traffic load offered by this type of ``connection-driven'' models can never match a target offered load as accurately as our ``byte-driven'' resamplings of connection vector traces.

Our work on trace resampling can be extended in several directions. First, there is some need to refine our handling of the packetization overhead, which would result in even more accurate load scaling. Second, our methods only manipulate one trace at a time. Being able to combine multiple traces would provide an even more flexible framework. While it seems straightforward to extend our methods to support this operation, demonstrating the validity of the results appears difficult. It represents a departure from measured traffic into a hypothetical traffic that may or may not be realistic, and it can introduce non-stationarities. Third, developing a broader model of network traffic, either parametric or non-parametric, could provide a better way to guide the resampling process. In this direction, a better understanding of the main patterns of source-level behavior would provide more flexible way of creating hypothetical scenarios. Our work on traffic clusters described above is a step in this direction, since combining clusters support the exploration of a wide range of traffic generation scenarios. The possibility of succinctly describing the range of patterns in a cluster, e.g., file-sharing applications with symmetric bulk transfers and concurrency, is specially useful for exploring future scenarios where applications that only represent a small fraction of the traffic become increasingly important.

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Next: Bibliography Up: Conclusions and Future Work Previous: Incorporating Additional Network-Level Parameter   Contents

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