The doctoral dissertations of the former Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and Aalto University Schools of Technology (CHEM, ELEC, ENG, SCI) published in electronic format are available in the electronic publications archive of Aalto University - Aaltodoc.
Aalto

Traffic Engineering in the Internet: From Traffic Characterization to Load Balancing and Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

Riikka Susitaival

Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science in Technology to be presented with due permission of the Department of Electrical and Communications Engineering for public examination and debate in Auditorium S1 at Helsinki University of Technology (Espoo, Finland) on the 19th of September, 2007, at 12 o'clock noon.

Overview in PDF format (ISBN 978-951-22-8831-1)   [6397 KB]
Dissertation is also available in print (ISBN 978-951-22-8830-4)

Abstract

Traffic engineering refers to the performance optimization of operational networks. On one hand, traffic offered between origin and destination nodes loads the network and on the other hand, this traffic has to be carried in the network in such a way that performance objectives are fulfilled. In this thesis, we study three different problem areas related to traffic engineering covering traffic characterization, load balancing and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing.

In the first part of this thesis we characterize the measured traffic on a link in the Finnish backbone network Funet. Traffic on the link is first considered as an aggregate and then split into origin-destination pairs based on the IP addresses of the packets. At a fine level of spatial aggregation we identify four typical OD pair representatives called "Normal", "Bursty", "Uniform" and "Periodic". In particular, we are interested in how the so-called moving IID Gaussian model fits together with the aggregate link data and the OD pair representatives.

The second part of the thesis considers load balancing in different types of networks. The idea of load balancing is to move traffic from congested links to other parts of the network in a well-controlled way. If the traffic demands are known, the load balancing can be formulated as an optimization problem. However, knowledge of traffic demands is often lacking. For that reason we propose an adaptive and distributed algorithm that gradually balances the load by making small changes in the traffic-splitting ratios on the basis of measured link loads. The application of the adaptive algorithm for both MPLS as well as for OSPF networks is considered. By numerical evaluation we find that the adaptive algorithm converges rapidly almost to the optimum. We also develop optimization algorithms that differentiate traffic classes in terms of mean delay. In this thesis, the differentiation is achieved by the use of both routing and WFQ scheduling. Finally, the load balancing of wireless multihop networks is considered by formulating a linear optimization problem for the joint optimization of both routing and scheduling of the network.

In the third part of the thesis we consider the population dynamics and performance of novel P2P file-sharing networks. First we study the dynamics of distributing a single chunk by a deterministic fluid model as well as by a more detailed Markov model, which makes evaluation of the lifetime of the system possible. Then we extend the Markov chain model to the case of two chunks and compare the performance of different chunk or peer selection policies in terms of the lifetime as well as the download time of the file. Finally, with a spatio-temporal model we assess how much selecting the nearest peer instead of a random one reduces the usage of the resources of the underlying network.

This thesis consists of an overview and of the following 10 publications:

  1. Ilmari Juva, Riikka Susitaival, Markus Peuhkuri, and Samuli Aalto. Traffic characterization for traffic engineering purposes: Analysis of Funet data. In Proceedings of the 1st EuroNGI Conference on Next Generation Internet Networks (NGI 2005), pages 404-411, April 2005. © 2005 IEEE. By permission.
  2. Riikka Susitaival, Ilmari Juva, Markus Peuhkuri, and Samuli Aalto. Characteristics of origin-destination pair traffic in Funet. Telecommunication Systems, 33: 67-88, 2006.
  3. Ilmari Juva, Riikka Susitaival, Markus Peuhkuri, and Samuli Aalto. Effects of spatial aggregation on the characteristics of origin-destination pair traffic in Funet. Helsinki University of Technology, Networking Laboratory, Report 1/2007, ISBN 978-951-22-8681-2, 2007. © 2007 by authors.
  4. Riikka Susitaival, Samuli Aalto, and Jorma Virtamo. Adaptive load balancing using MPLS. In Proceedings of Joint Conference 12th GI/ITG Conference on Measuring, Modelling and Evaluation of Computer and Communication Systems (MMB) together with 3rd Polish-German Teletraffic Symposium (PGTS), pages 15-24, 2004.
  5. Riikka Susitaival and Samuli Aalto. Adaptive load balancing with OSPF. In Proceedings of the Second International Working Conference on Performance Modelling and Evaluation of Heterogeneous Networks (HET-NETs 2004), pages P9/1-P9/10, 2004. © 2004 Networks UK Publishers. By permission.
  6. Riikka Susitaival, Jorma Virtamo, and Samuli Aalto. Load balancing by MPLS in differentiated services networks. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Architectures for Quality of Service in the Internet (Art-QoS 2003), pages 252-264, March 2003. © 2003 Springer Science+Business Media. By permission.
  7. Riikka Susitaival. Load balancing by joint optimization of routing and scheduling in wireless mesh networks. In Proceedings of the 20th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 2007), pages 483-494, 2007. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media. By permission.
  8. Riikka Susitaival, Samuli Aalto, and Jorma Virtamo. Analyzing the dynamics and resource usage of P2P file sharing by a spatio-temporal model. In Proceedings of the 2006 International Workshop on P2P for High Performance Computational Sciences (P2P-HPCS 2006) in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2006), pages 420-427, May 2006. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media. By permission.
  9. Riikka Susitaival and Samuli Aalto. Modelling the population dynamics and the file availability in a BitTorrent-like P2P system with decreasing peer arrival rate. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems (IWSOS 2006), pages 34-48, September 2006. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media. By permission.
  10. Riikka Susitaival and Samuli Aalto. Analyzing the file availability and download time in a P2P file sharing system. In Proceedings of the 3rd EuroNGI Conference on Next Generation Internet Networks (NGI 2007), pages 88-95, 2007. © 2007 IEEE. By permission.

Errata of publication 1

Keywords: traffic engineering, Internet measurements, traffic characterization, load balancing, MPLS, OSPF, peer-to-peer, file sharing

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© 2007 Helsinki University of Technology

Last update 2011-05-26