This chapter examines the statistical characteristics of source-level
trace replay experiments, comparing them to those of their corresponding
original traces.
As discussed in Chapter 5, and illustrated in
Figure 5.1, a packet header trace
and its source-level trace replay can be compared at two levels.
The first level is how well the set of connection vectors
extracted from
are preserved by the trace replay experiments.
This means to collect a packet header trace
from the replay
and extract a new set of connection vectors
.
Section 5.2 presented a comparison of
and
for three traces. It demonstrated that the characteristics of
captured by
are accurately reproduced by the traffic generation
method and its implementation.
The second level at which traces and their
replays can be compared is to directly extract statistics from
and
. If these statistics are reasonably close,
we can say that the traffic generation method reproduces
the original traffic using closed-loop traffic generation.
This is the type of comparison discussed in this chapter. As we will show,
source-level trace replay generally results in a good approximation of the
statistical characteristics of the original traffic, which supports the
use of the a-b-t model as a foundation for realistic traffic generation.
Doctoral Dissertation: Generation and Validation of Empirically-Derived TCP Application Workloads
© 2006 Félix Hernández-Campos