Capacity dimensioning based on traffic measurement in the Internet

Network dimensioning is becoming important in order to provide a stable Quality of Service (QoS) to the customers. However, it is not an easy task because the Internet traffic changes dynamically and frequently. We thus need a new approach for network dimensioning suitable to the Internet. Probably, it would be quite different from the existing well-established method for the telephone network. Actually, our method proposed in this thesis tries to establish a new paradigm of network dimensioning for the new communication era of the Internet. In this paper, we consider the network dimensioning approach in order to resolve the bottleneck for stable and QoS-rich data communications in the Internet. For that purpose, a possible cause of the bottleneck must be examined not only within the network, but also at the end hosts, which originated in an intrinsic nature of the Internet architecture. In our study, we first propose a method to identify the bottleneck for improving the performance of the end users. Once the network is found to be bottleneck, the network operator should determine how much the network resources is increased to meet the end user’s QoS requirements. So, we next focused on the measurement method for utilization of the bottleneck link between end-to-end hosts. To measure the 1 utilization of the bottleneck link accurately, we propose a new measurement method that can eliminate several kinds of measurement errors. We collected the measurement results from the actual operating Internet, and provide an evidence to support an appropriateness of our approach. Based on the measurements, we finally propose a design framework in order to determine the adequate link capacity for offering a desired QoS level to the end users. All correspondence should be directed to: Dr. Shingo Ata Department of Information and Communication Engineering Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka City University 3–3–138 Sugimoto, Sumiyoshi-ku, Osaka 558–8585, Japan E-mail: [email protected] Phone, Fax: +81–6–6605–2191