Early Detection of Performance Degradation from Basic Aggregated Link Utilization Statistics

The growth of Internet traffic and the variety of traffic classes make network performance extremely difficult to evaluate. Even though most current methods rely on complex or costly hardware, recent research on bandwidth sharing has suggested the possibility of defining evaluation methods that simply require basic statistics on aggregated link utilization, such as mean and variance. This would greatly simplify monitoring systems as these statistics are easily calculable from Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) calls. However, existing methods require knowledge of certain fixed information about the network being monitored (e.g. link capacities). This is usually unavailable when the operator's view is limited to its share of leased links or when shared links carry traffic with different priorities. In this paper, departing from the analysis of aggregated link utilization statistics obtainable from SNMP requests, we propose a method that detects traffic degradation based on link utilization samples. It does not require knowledge of the capacity of the aggregated link or any other network parameters, giving network operators the possibility to control network performance in a more reliable and cost-effective way.