Traffic Analysis and Modeling of IP Core Networks

There are many reasons for analyzing traffic in an operational IP network: studying user behavior, measuring the network performance, observing network usage levels and identifying fault situations. All communication networks in general are monitored at some level by the administrators to be aware of how the users behave and how the network meets their demands. Simulations provide an efficient and economical way of estimating the performance of a network. They are widely utilized when studying communication networks and they have proven especially useful when designing new and novel networks. However, an unresolved issue has always been: how reliable are the results from the simulations? This thesis presents a method for evaluating the accuracy of network traffic simula-tions. The method consists of three stages: analysing the traffic in a real network, performing simulations of the corresponding scenario, and finally, comparing the per-formance of the real and simulated networks. If the two networks function similarly, simulations can be said to accurately mimic the real world. In this thesis, only the first stage — analysing the real network — is completed and the simulations are left fo