On flow concurrency in the internet and its implications for capacity sharing

  • Authors:
  • Brian Trammell;Dominik Schatzmann

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on Capacity sharing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Flow concurrency is the measure of the number of active flows at a given point in time at a given point in the net- work, and can be used as a complement to traffic volume to understand the dynamics of a measured network. It is of particular interest given the spread of devices through the network which keep per-flow state. In this work, we first present a simple methodology for measuring flow concurrency using network flow data, then apply this methodology to a long-term data archive captured at the border of a national-scale research network to measure flow concurrency in selected example network configurations (e.g., at a content consumer network, on a content provider network, at an interconnect point). Flow concurrency is interesting in the context of capacity sharing efforts in two ways. First and most obviously, devices which verify and enforce policy compliance for capacity sharing must keep per-flow state on either end of a flow; flow state requirements therefore dictate where such devices may be placed in the network, and the trust properties of the algorithms they run. Second, as the deployment of flow-state-keeping devices in the network increases, flow state itself becomes a "congestible" resource just as queue space is: future work in capacity sharing may consider addressing this.