Estimating Bandwidth Requirements using Flow-level Measurements

Bandwidth provisioning is an important task of network management and it is done aiming to meet desired levels of quality of service. Current practices of provisioning are mostly based on rules-of-thumb and use coarse traffic measurements that may lead to problems of under and over dimensioning of links. Several solutions have already been proposed, in which link provisioning is done by measuring and analyzing network traffic at the packet-level. However, high-speed traffic rates as observed nowadays demand scalable measurement solutions. In this regard, flow monitoring seems to be a promising approach. Many software tools and network equipment already provide flow monitoring. But, flows result in inherent information loss due to the aggregation of packets details, i.e. only a summary of traffic characteristics is provided. The poster will present a flow-based approach that overcomes the problem of traffic information loss and enable the use of flows in place of packet measurements for bandwidth provisioning. Among other results we will show that outcomes from the proposed flow-based approach can be as good as the ones obtained with packet-level measurements