Analysis of ISP IP/ATM network traffic measurements

ABSTRACT

This paper presents network traffic measurements collected from a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) whose traffic is being carried over an ATM backbone network. Much of the aggregate traffic is Web-related, and thus represents a Web/TCP/IP/AAL-5/ATM protocol stack. Four traces have been collected at the AAL-5 frame level, using a NavTel IW95000 ATM test set. These traces provide a detailed look at protocol-level behaviours, but only for rather short time durations (e.g., 30-40 seconds per trace). Analyses focus on aggregate-level traffic characteristics, as well as host-level and TCP connection-level traffic characteristics.The main workload characteristics observed from the measurements are the burstiness of the aggregate and individual traffic flows, a non-uniform distribution of traffic amongst hosts, a trimodal packet size distribution, and the strong presence of network-level effects (e.g., client modem speed, network Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU), network round trip time, TCP slow start) in the traffic structures seen. The workload characteristics are quite consistent across the four traces studied.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols

          Nouns: TCP/IP
      C.2.5 Local and Wide-Area Networks
          Subjects: Internet (e.g., TCP/IP)

General Terms:
Design, Measurement, Performance, Standardization

Keywords:
ATM networks, TCP/IP, network traffic measurement, web, wworkload characterization