Figure 6.53:
Byte throughput time series for Abilene-I Clev/Ipls and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Figure 6.54:
Byte throughput time series for Abilene-I Ipls/Clev and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
The two directions of Abilene-I show the highest throughput of the
five traces considered in this chapter. Combined byte throughput is often above 400 Mbps,
creating the most challenging traffic generation scenario in terms of traffic volume.
The excellent agreement between
original and replay data shown in Figures 6.53 and 6.54
provide convincing evidence in favor of observation B.1. The replays closely track
the general shape of the time series, even reproducing major changes such as the one
between minutes 30 and 42. In general, we observe some spikes that appear in both
original and replay time series, while others do not.
Lossless replays and collapsed-epochs replays do not seem to add any significant
burstiness for this trace, which agrees with the weak statements in observations
B.2 and B.3. Note however that the high aggregate throughput could easily be hiding
extra burstiness of the magnitude observed for previous traces.
For example, careful examination uncovers higher throughput above the original
in collapsed-epochs replay, for the spike in minute 7 and for the region between minutes
15 and 30.
Figure 6.55:
Packet throughput time series for Abilene-I Clev/Ipls and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Figure 6.56:
Packet throughput time series for Abilene-I Ipls/Clev and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
The time series of packet throughput in Figures 6.55 and
6.56 are consistent with observation P.1, showing an excellent
match between original and full replays.
Given that Abilene-I is the trace with the lowest loss level
(see Section 4.1.3), this could suggest that the difficulties with the last
two UNC traces were probably due to the complexity of their loss characteristics.
Collapsed-epochs replays show a lower packet throughput, generally 2,000 to 3,000 packets
below the original. In relative terms, the difference is between 8% and 10%, which
is smaller than for previous traces. This could easily be explained by a larger
percentage of bulk transfers in Abilene-I, where a single ADU carrying a single file
constitutes the only payload of the TCP connection. This is for example the case
in FTP-DATA connections.
Figure 6.57:
Byte throughput marginals for Abilene-I Clev/Ipls and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Figure 6.58:
Byte throughput marginals for Abilene-I Ipls/Clev and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
The marginal distributions from Abilene-I presented in Figure 6.57
and 6.58 show very similar bodies for original and replay
traces. This further confirms observation B.1.
Unlike previous traces, we find remarkably similar tails for all four replay traces
that are consistently lighter than the original tail. The difference is specially
striking in the outbound direction. One possible explanation for this intriguing result
for the Abilene-I trace comes from the type of monitored link.
Abilene-I is the only trace in this chapter collected in a link technology
(OC-48, 2.5 Gbps) different from the one used in the replay (Gigabit Ethernet, 1 Gbps).
While the plots in Figures 6.53 and 6.54
showed no single minute with more than 500 Mbps, it is perfectly possible
to have shorter (e.g., 10 millisecond) intervals with far higher byte throughput.
An alternative explanation is the presence of some possible limit in the forwarding capacity of
our software routers, which is not far above 500 Mbps.
Figure 6.59:
Packet throughput marginals for Abilene-I Clev/Ipls and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Figure 6.60:
Packet throughput marginals for Abilene-I Ipls/Clev and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
The bodies of the marginal distributions for packet throughput in
Figures 6.59 and 6.60 are consistent
with observation P.1. Collapsed-epochs replays show substantially lighter
distributions, while full replays are closer to the original. The approximation in the
outbound direction is remarkably good. As a consequence of the low loss in this trace,
observation P.3 does not apply to Abilene-I. The impact of losses is smaller than the
impact of source-level modeling. This effect is however dwarfed by the large difference
between the tails of the replays and the original one.
As discussed for byte throughput, differences in link technology between Abilene-I and
the testbed could explain the far lighter tails in the replays.
Figure 6.61:
Wavelet spectra of the byte throughput time series for Abilene-I Clev/Ipls and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Figure 6.62:
Wavelet spectra of the byte throughput time series for Abilene-I Ipls/Clev and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Table 6.9:
Estimated Hurst parameters and their confidence intervals for the
byte throughput time series of Abilene-I and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Trace
Inbound
Outbound
Abilene-I
C. I.
C. I.
Original
1.0597
[1.0320, 1.0874]
1.0604
[1.0327, 1.0881]
Lossless Replay
1.1170
[1.0893, 1.1447]
1.1356
[1.1079, 1.1633]
Lossy Replay
1.0814
[1.0537, 1.1091]
1.1079
[1.0802, 1.1356]
Lossless Coll. Epochs
1.1824
[1.1573, 1.2075]
1.2111
[1.1860, 1.2362]
Lossy Coll. Epochs
1.1580
[1.1329, 1.1831]
1.1874
[1.1623, 1.2125]
The wavelet spectra for the inbound direction, shown in Figure 6.61,
support observation B.4. However, the difference between original and full replays
is substantial in the outbound direction, shown in Figure 6.62.
Given the major change in slope after octave 11, it is difficult to draw any
conclusions from this finding. Regarding observation B.5, we do observe worse
approximations by the collapsed-epochs replays, which exhibit substantially deeper
ditches around octave 5 (notice the lower smallest value in the y-axis of the outbound
plot). In any case, the replays do not closely track the fine scale shape of the
spectra, which is in agreement with observation B.6.
Hurst parameters, shown in Table 6.9, are remarkably
high for this trace. All of them are above 1, suggesting significant non-stationarity,
which is clearly preserved in the replays. The estimate for the lossy
full replay is the closest one for both directions. Together with the wavelet spectra,
this supports observation B.7.
Figure 6.63:
Wavelet spectra of the packet throughput time series for Abilene-I Clev/Ipls and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Figure 6.64:
Wavelet spectra of the packet throughput time series for Abilene-I Ipls/Clev and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Table 6.10:
Estimated Hurst parameters and their confidence intervals for the
packet throughput time series of Abilene-I and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Trace
Inbound
Outbound
Abilene-I
C. I.
C. I.
Original
1.1326
[1.1075, 1.1577]
1.0996
[1.0745, 1.1247]
Lossless Replay
1.1191
[1.0941, 1.1442]
1.1443
[1.1192, 1.1694]
Lossy Replay
1.0849
[1.0598, 1.1100]
1.1232
[1.0981, 1.1483]
Lossless Coll. Epochs
1.1841
[1.1563, 1.2118]
1.1923
[1.1646, 1.2200]
Lossy Coll. Epochs
1.1757
[1.1480, 1.2034]
1.1850
[1.1573, 1.2127]
As for byte throughput, the wavelet spectra of the packet throughput for Abilene-I
shown in Figures 6.63 and 6.64
are not comparable to previous cases, and inconsistent with observation P.4.
The difference between the replays and the original follows the same pattern
in all of the cases, with a large ditch in octave 5. This ditch is much more
pronounced for the collapsed-epochs replays. In any case, the result is a poor
match between the original spectra and the replays, both at fine scales and at the
the scaling region. Estimated Hurst parameters for the replays are lower for the inbound
replays and higher for the outbound ones, and mostly outside confidence intervals.
Incorporating losses had a minimal impact on the wavelet spectra of the Abilene-I
replays, resulting only in a small decrease of the slope in the scaling region.
This decrease translated into a slightly smaller Hurst parameters estimates for
the lossy replays.
Figure 6.65:
Active connection time series for Abilene-I and
its four types of source-level trace replay.
Unlike the results for previous traces, Figure 6.65 shows
a substantial difference between the lossy full replay and the original time series.
This weakens observations C.1 and C.2 from
Section 6.4.3, being the replay around 15% below the original.
The rest of the observations clearly hold. The relative magnitude of the gap between the
full replays and the collapsed-epochs ones is largest for Abilene-I.
The reason is unclear, especially given the excellent approximations for the other traces.
It is hard to imagine a larger fraction of bandwidth-constrained connections in this trace,
and round-trip time estimation should be as accurate as for the other traces.
We are more inclined to think that the mix of applications in Abilene-I includes a substantial
number of (probably long) connections whose driving application is not well-described by
our source-level model.