Automated Traffic measurements and analysis in Grid5000

Today, the capacity and the usage of the Internet is fundamentally changing. In the forthcoming years, millions of homes will have access to the Internet with fibber lines. Network companies will offer speeds of up to 1 Gbps on fibbers. Consequently ultra-high-speed applications will be enabled for low-cost, such as high-definition teleconferencing, telemedicine and advanced telecommuting for people working from home. For understanding the Future Internet traffic and the required protocol’s characteristics and behavior, the analysis of fully controlled and reproducible experiments which allow the experimenter to change a lot of parameters (aggregation level, congestion intensity, packet size or source flow size distribution, etc.); and then study separately their impact on the traffic are needed. To have a better insight on the real nature and on the evolution of network traffic we argue that fine-grain analysis of real traffic traces have to complement simulations studies as well as coarse grain measurement performed by classical flow measurement systems. In particular, packet level measurements and analysis are needed. As will be demonstrated the combination of three elements: Metroflux, a very fine grain traffic capture and analysis tool, Grid5000, a very flexible large scale testbed and NXE, a network experiment automator, give researchers and network operators a unique and very powerful platform to perform packet level analysis of the traffic from a large collection of controlled sources, and particularly to perform the challenging task of monitoring a router buffer. We will illustrate several usages of this toolset, such as the investigation of conditions under which several traffic theories apply, as well as studies on traffic, protocols and systems interactions, etc.