Empirical assessment of VoIP overload detection tests

The control of communication networks critically relies on procedures capable of detecting unanticipated load changes. In this paper we explore such techniques, in a setting in which each connection consumes roughly the same amount of bandwidth (with VoIP as a leading example). We focus on large-deviations based techniques developed earlier in [8] that monitor the number of connections present, and that issue an alarm when this number abruptly changes. The procedures proposed in [8] are demonstrated by using real traces from an operational environment. Our experiments show that our detection procedure is capable of adequately identifying load changes.