skip to main content
article
Free Access

Analyzing stability in wide-area network performance

Authors Info & Claims
Published:01 June 1997Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

The Internet is a very large scale, complex, dynamical system that is hard to model and analyze. In this paper, we develop and analyze statistical models for the observed end-to-end network performance based on extensive packet-level traces (consisting of approximately 1.5 billion packets) collected from the primary Web site for the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games in 1996. We find that observed mean throughputs for these transfers measured over 60 million complete connections vary widely as a function of end-host location and time of day, confirming that the Internet is characterized by a large degree of heterogeneity. Despite this heterogeneity, we find (using best-fit linear regression techniques) that we can express the throughput for Web transfers to most hosts as a random variable with a log-normal distribution. Then, using observed throughput as the control parameter, we attempt to quantify the spatial (statistical similarity across neighboring hosts) and temporal (persistence over time) stability of network performance. We find that Internet hosts that are close to each other often have almost identically distributed probability distributions of throughput. We also find that throughputs to individual hosts often do not change appreciably for several minutes. Overall, these results indicate that there is promise in protocol mechanisms that cache and share network characteristics both within a single host and amongst nearby hosts.

References

  1. 1 K. Agrawala and D Sanghi. Network Dynamics: An Experimental Study of the Interact. In Proc. GLOBECOM "92, December 1992.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. 2 IBM AlphaWorks Home Page. http:// www.alphaworks.ibm.com, 1996.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. 3 M Arlitt and C.L. Williamson. Web Server Workload Characterization: The Search for Invariants. In Proc. ACM SIGMETR1CS '96, May 1996. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. 4 J.C Bolot. End-to-End Packet Delay and Loss Behavior in the Internet. In Proc. ACM SIG- COMM '93, San Francisco, CA, Sept 1993. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. 5 R Caceres. Multiplexing Traffic and the Entrance to Wide Area Networks. PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, December 1992. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. 6 CAIRN Home Page. http:/lwww.isi.eduldiv7/ cairn/, 1996.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. 7 R.L. Carter and M. E. Crovella. Dynamic server selection using bandwidth probing in wide-area networks. Technical Report B U-CS-96-007, Computer Science Department, Boston University, March 1996. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. 8 M. Crovella and A. Bestavros. Self-Similarity in World Wide Web Traffic: Evidence and Possible Causes. In Proc. ACM SIGMETRICS, May 1996. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. 9 R.B. D'Agostino and M.A. Stephens. Goodness-of-Fit Techniques. Marcel Dekker, New York, NY, 1986. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. 10 P. Danzig and S. Jamin. tcplib: A Library of TCP Internetwork Traffic Characteristics. Technical Report USC-CS-91-495, University of Southern California, 1991.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. 11 P. Danzig, S. Jamin, R. Caceres, D. Mitzel, and D. Estrin. An Empirical Workload Model for Driving Wide-Area TCP/IP Network Simulations. Internetworking: Research and Experience, 3(1 ): 1-26, March 1992.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. 12 O. Gudmundson, D. Sanghi, and K. Agrawala. Experimental Assessment of End-to-End Behavior on Internet. In Proc. InfoComm '93, March 1993.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. 13 S.A. Heimlich. Traffic Characterization of the NSFnet National Backbone. In Proc. SIGMET- RICS '90, May 1990. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. 14 R. Jain. The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis. John Wiley and Sons, 1991.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. 15 S. Keshav. Packet-Pair Flow Control. IEEE/ A CM Transactions on Networking, February 1995.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. 16 W. Leland, M. Taqqu, W. Willinger, and D. Wilson. On the Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Traffic. In Proc. SIGCOMM '93, September 1993. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. 17 B.A. Mah. An Empirical Model of HTTP Network Traffic. In Proc. lnfoComm '97, April 1997. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. 18 S. McCanne and V. Jacobson. The BSD Packet Filter: A New Architecture for User-Level Packet Caplure. In Proc. Winter '93 USENIX Conference, San Diego, CA, January I993. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. 19 J.C. Mogul. Observing TCP Dynamics in Real Networks. Technical Report 92/2, Digital Western Research Lab, April 1992.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. 20 J.C. Mogul. Network Behavior of a Busy Web Server and its Clients. Technical Report 95/5, Digital Western Research Lab, October 1995.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. 21 ns- LBNI, Network Simulator. http://wwwnrg.ee.lbl.gov/ns/, 1996.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. 22 Official 1996 olympic web site- home page. http://www.atlanta.olympic.org, 1996.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. 23 V Paxson. Empirically-Derived Analytic Models of Wide-Area TCP Connections. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2(4):316-336, August 1994. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  24. 24 V. Paxson. An Analysis of End-to-End Internet Dynamics, Part II, 1996. Ph.D. dissertation in preparation. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. 25 V. Paxson. End-to-End Routing Behavior in the Internet. In Proc. ACM SIGCOMM '96, August 1996. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. 26 V. Paxson and S. Floyd. Wide-Area Traffic: The Failure of Poisson Modeling. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 3(3):226-244, June 1995. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. 27 M. Schwartz, D. Ewing, and R. HaU. A Measurement of Interact File Transfer Traffic. Technical Report CU-CS-371-92, University of Colorado, January 1992.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  28. 28 W.R. Stevens. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, Nov 1994.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  29. 29 WOM Boiler Room. http://www.womplex.ibm.com, 1996.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. Analyzing stability in wide-area network performance

              Recommendations

              Comments

              Login options

              Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

              Sign in

              Full Access

              • Published in

                cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
                ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review  Volume 25, Issue 1
                June 1997
                298 pages
                ISSN:0163-5999
                DOI:10.1145/258623
                Issue’s Table of Contents
                • cover image ACM Conferences
                  SIGMETRICS '97: Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
                  June 1997
                  302 pages
                  ISBN:0897919092
                  DOI:10.1145/258612

                Copyright © 1997 ACM

                Publisher

                Association for Computing Machinery

                New York, NY, United States

                Publication History

                • Published: 1 June 1997

                Check for updates

                Qualifiers

                • article

              PDF Format

              View or Download as a PDF file.

              PDF

              eReader

              View online with eReader.

              eReader
              About Cookies On This Site

              We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

              Learn more

              Got it!