The problem of synthetically generating IP traffic matrices: initial recommendations

There exist a wide variety of network design problems that require a traffic matrix as input in order to carry out performance evaluation. The research community has not had at its disposal any information about how to construct realistic traffic matrices. We introduce here the two basic problems that need to be addressed to construct such matrices. The first is that of synthetically generating traffic volume levels that obey spatial and temporal patterns as observed in realistic traffic matrices. The second is that of assigning a set of numbers (representing traffic levels) to particular node pairs in a given topology. This paper provides an in-depth discussion of the many issues that arise when addressing these problems. Our approach to the first problem is to extract statistical characteristics for such traffic from real data collected inside two large IP backbones. We dispel the myth that uniform distributions can be used to randomly generate numbers for populating a traffic matri...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: CCR
• Authors: Antonio Nucci, Ashwin Sridharan, Nina Taft
• Keywords: CCR 2005, Realistic Traffic Matrices, Traffic Matrix, Traffic Volume Levels