A peer-to-peer system for large scale traffic measurements

Abstract

The characteristics of Internet traffic are becoming more and more complex due to the large and growing diversity of applications, the drastic differences in user behaviors and the mobility of users and devices, the complexity of traffic generation and control mechanisms, and the increasing diversity of link types and qualities. In such an environment, it is inevitable that network management tasks will rely heavily on (real-time) traffic measurements. Due to the large amounts of data that need to be processed and stored, measurement platforms have to become more distributed, allowing for scattered storage, replication and efficient retrieval of measurement data. This paper describes the specification, development and evaluation of distributed traffic measurement system with a peer-to-peer architecture, based on dynamic hierarchical overlay, highly adaptive to resource constraints, and providing replication of measurement data.