An Information-theoretic Approach to Network Monitoring and Measurement

Network engineers and operators are faced with a number of challenges that arise in the context of network monitoring and measurement. These include: i) how much information is included in measurement traces and by how much can we compress those traces?, ii) how much information is captured by different monitoring paradigms and tools ranging from full packet header captures to flow-level captures (such as with NetFlow) to packet and byte counts (such as with SNMP)? and iii) how much joint information is included in traces collected at different points and can we take advantage of this joint information? In this paper we develop a network model and an information theoretic framework within which to address these questions. We use the model and the framework to first determine the benefits of compressing traces captured at a single monitoring point, and we outline approaches to achieve those benefits. We next consider the benefits of joint coding, or equivalently of joint compressi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Yong Liu, Donald F. Towsley, Tao Ye, Jean-Chrysostome Bolot
• Keywords: IMC 2005, Joint Information, Monitoring Points, Packet Header Captures