PAPER Performance Analysis of Large-Scale IP Networks

SUMMARY In this paper, we propose a novel analysis method for large-scale networks with consideration of the behavior of the conges-tion control mechanism of TCP. In the analysis, we model the behavior of TCP at end-host and network link as an independent system, and com-bine them into a single system in order to analyze the entire network. Using this analysis, we can analyze a large-scale network, i.e. with over 100/1,000/10,000 routers/hosts/links and 100,000 TCP connections in sub-stantially short time. Especially, a calculation time of our analysis, it is different from that of ns-2, is independent of a network bandwidth and/or propagation delay. Specifically, we can derive the utilization of the network links, the packet loss ratio of the link buffer, the round-trip time (RTT) and the throughput of TCP connections, and the location and degree of the net-work congestion. We validate our approximate analysis by comparing an-alytic results with simulation ones. We also show that our analysis method treats the behavior of TCP connection in a large-scale network appropri-ately