Network Performance Measurement and Analysis

Outline Measurement Tools and Techniques Workload generation Analysis Basic statistics Queuing models Simulation

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Measurement and Analysis Overview

Size, complexity and diversity of the Internet makes it very difficult to understand cause-effect relationships Measurement is necessary for understanding current system behavior and how new systems will behave
How, when, where, what do we measure?

Measurement is meaningless without careful analysis

Analysis of data gathered from networks is quite different from work done in other disciplines

Measurement/analysis enables models to be built which can be used to effectively develop and evaluate new techniques
Statistical models Queuing models Simulation models
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Determining What to Measure

Before any measurements can take place one must determine what to measure There are many commonly used network performance characteristics
Latency Throughput Response time Arrival rate Utilization Bandwidth Loss Routing Reliability
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Measurement Introduction
Internet measurement is done to either analyze/characterize network phenomena or to test new tools, protocols, systems, etc. Measuring Internet performance is easier said than done
What does performance mean? Workload (what and where youre measuring) selection is critical
Reproducibility is often essential

Many tools have been developed to measure/monitor general characteristics of network performance
traceroute and ping are two of the most popular
These are examples of active measurement tools

Passive tools are the other major category

Representative and reproducible workload generation will be a focus

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Active Measurement Tools

Send probe packet(s) into the network and measure a response
Ping: RTT and loss
Zing: one way Poisson probes

Traceroute: path and RTT Nettimer (Lai): latest bottleneck bandwidth using packet pair method

Tn+1 - Tn = max(S/BW, T1 T0) Size/BW T1 T0

Pathchar: per-hop bandwidth, latency, loss measurement

Pchar, clink: open-source reimplementation of pathchar

Tn+1 Tn

Problem: measurement timescales vary widely

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Passive Measurement Tools

Passive tools: Capture data as it passes by
Logging at application level Packet capture applications (tcpdump) uses packet capture filter (bpf,libpcap)
Requires access to the wire Can have many problems (adds, deletes, reordering)

Flow-based measurement tools SNMP tools Routing looking glass sites

Problems
LOTS of data! Privacy issues Getting packet scoped in backbone of the network

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Workload Generation
Local and/or wide area experiments often require representative and reproducible workloads How do we select a workload?
Currently HTTP makes up the majority of Internet traffic

Trace-based workloads
Capture traces and replay them Black-box method

Synthetic workloads
Abstraction of actual operation May not capture all aspects of workload

Analytic workloads
Attempt to model workload precisely Very difficult
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SURGE Web Workload Generator

Scalable URl Generator
Analytic workload generator Based on 12 empirically derived distributions of Web browsing behaviror Explicit, parameterized models Captures heavy-tailed (highly variable) properties of Web workloads Widely used SURGE components: Statistical distribution generator Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request generator
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Workload characteristics captured in SURGE

BF EF1 EF2 Off time SF Off time BF EF1

Characteristic Component
File Size Base file - body Base file - tail Embedded file Single file1 Single file 2 Request Size Body Tail Document Popularity Temporal Locality OFF Times Embedded References Session Lengths

Model

System Impact
* * * * * * *

Lognormal File System Pareto Lognormal Lognormal Lognormal Lognormal Network Pareto Zipf Caches, buffers Lognormal Caches, buffers Pareto Pareto ON Times Inverse Gaussian Connection times
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SURGE Architecture
SURGE Client System

ON/OFF Thread ON/OFF Thread ON/OFF Thread SURGE Client System LAN Web Server System

SURGE Client System

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SURGE and SPECWeb96 exercise servers very differently

40
Percent CPU Utilization

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 -5 0 200 400
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Surge

SPECWeb96
SPECWeb96

SURGE

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Packets per Second

Analyzing Measured Data

Analyzing measured data in networks is typically done using statistical methods
Selecting appropriate analysis method(s) is critical
Averaging Dispersion (variability) Correlations Regression analysis Distributional analysis Frequency analysis Principal-component analysis Cluster analysis

Each form of analysis has strengths and weaknesses

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Self-Similar Nature of Network Traffric

W. Leland, M. Taqqu, W. Willinger, D. Wilson, On the Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Traffic, IEEE/ACM TON, 1994.
Baker Award winner

V. Paxson, S. Floyd, Wide-Area Traffic: The Failure of Poisson Modeling, IEEE/ACM TON, 1995. M. Crovella, A. Bestavros, Self-Similarity in World Wide Web Traffic: Evidence and Possible Causes, IEEE/ACM TON, 1997.

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Queuing Models
One of the key modeling techniques for computer systems in general
Vast literature on queuing theory Nicely suited for network analysis Prof. Mary Vernon is our local expert

Generally, queuing systems deal with a situation where jobs (of which there are many) wait in line for a resource (of which there are few)
Queuing theory can enable us to determine response time Examples?
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Queuing Models contd.

Example: packets arriving at a router how can we determine how long it takes for packets to be forwarded by the router? Characteristics necessary to specify a queuing system
Arrival process Service time distribution Number of servers System capacity (number of buffers) Population size Service discipline Kendal notation: A/S/m/B/K/SD

Response time = waiting time + service time For stability, mean arrival rate must be less than mean service rate
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Littles Law
One of the most basic theorems in queuing theory (1961)
Mean number jobs in system = arrival rate * mean response time Treats a system as a black box Applies whenever number of jobs entering the system equals number of jobs leaving the system
No jobs created or lost inside system

Can be extended to include systems with finite buffers

Example: Average forwarding time in a router is 100 microseconds, I/O rate for packets is 100k. What is the mean number of packets buffered in the router?
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Simulation Models
Simulation is one of the most common/important methods of analysis/modeling
Typically an abstraction of the system under consideration Can provide significant insight to systems behavior

Network simulation is difficult because of the different layers of operation and the complexity at each layer Simulation options: build your own, use someone elses Canonical network simulator is ns developed at LBL
www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns ssf-net is a new, routing-enabled simulator

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