Network performance monitoring at small time scales

SNMP statistics are usually collected over intervals of 5 minutes and correspond to average activity of IP links and network elements for the duration of the interval. Nevertheless, reports of traffic performance across periods of minutes can mask out performance degradation due to short-lived events, such as micro-congestion episodes, that manifest themselves at smaller time scales. In this paper we perform a measurement study of packet traces collected inside the Sprint IP network to identify the time scales over which microcongestion episodes occur. We characterize these episodes with respect to their amplitude, frequency and duration. We define a new performance metric that could be easily computed by a router and reported every 5 minutes through SNMP to shed light into the micro-behavior of the carried traffic. We show that the proposed performance metric is well suited to track the time scales over which microcongestion episodes occur, and may be useful for a variety of network...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Konstantina Papagiannaki, Rene L. Cruz, Christophe Diot
• Keywords: IMC 2003, Microcongestion Episodes, Performance, Time Scales