RADIANT Traffic Characterization
The ability to predict the overall behavior of aggregate network
traffic has far-reaching implications with respect to the scheduling
of network traffic, traffic shaping, flow control, and congestion
control (all integral parts of the TCP protocol), especially with
emerging high-bandwidth, real-time applications and an exponentially
increasing Internet population.
While network traffic characterization has been studied extensively
due to its importance in network scheduling and throughput, an
accurate characterization of network traffic still remains elusive.
All case studies thus far have been limited in scope, e.g., few
users, low traffic utilization, or limited networking technologies,
or have focused on the wrong issues, e.g., file-size distribution.
Thus, a more rigorous study of network traffic needs to be done as
we head into the Next-Generation Internet (NGI).
With an accurate characterization in hand, we can then propose
modifications and overhauls to the TCP protocol to significantly
improve network performance over the Internet as well as private
networks, such as those in use at LANL.
