Understanding traffic dynamics at a backbone POP

Nina Taft; Supratik Bhattacharyya; Jorjeta Jetcheva; Christophe Diot

doi:10.1117/12.434391

25 July 2001 Understanding traffic dynamics at a backbone POP

Nina Taft, Supratik Bhattacharyya, Jorjeta Jetcheva, Christophe Diot

Proceedings Volume 4526, Scalability and Traffic Control in IP Networks; (2001) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.434391
Event: ITCom 2001: International Symposium on the Convergence of IT and Communications, 2001, Denver, CO, United States

Abstract

Spatial and temporal information about traffic dynamics is central to the design of effective traffic engineering practices for IP backbones. In this paper we study backbone traffic dynamics using data collected at a major POP on a tier-1 IP backbone. We develop a methodology that combines packet-level traces from access links in the POP and BGP routing information to build components of POP-to-POP traffic matrices. Our results show that there is wide disparity in the volume of traffic headed towards different egress POPs. At the same time, we find that current routing practices in the backbone tend to constrain traffic between ingress-egress POP pairs to a small number of paths. As a result, there is a wide variation in the utilization level of links in the backbone. Frequent capacity upgrades of the heavily used links are expensive; the need for such upgrades can be reduced by designing load balancing policies that will route more traffic over less utilized links. We identify traffic aggregates based on destination address prefixes and find that this set of criteria isolates a few aggregates that account for an overwhelmingly large portion of inter-POP traffic. We also demonstrate that these aggregates exhibit stability throughout the day on per-hour time scales, and thus they form a natural basis for splitting traffic over multiple paths in order to improve load balancing.

Citation Download Citation

Nina Taft, Supratik Bhattacharyya, Jorjeta Jetcheva, and Christophe Diot "Understanding traffic dynamics at a backbone POP", Proc. SPIE 4526, Scalability and Traffic Control in IP Networks, (25 July 2001); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.434391

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