Router Oriented Traffic Flow Analysis for IP Backbone Network

Most network behaviours of IP networks are monitored and controlled on the gateway routers. The behaviours of the whole network are mainly dominated by the superposition of origin-destination (OD) flows distributed over all the links of a network. We made principal component analysis (PCA) on the autonomous system (AS) to AS flows collected at some gateway routers of a backbone network (GEANT) over a long period of time. From the analysis we found that the structures of network traffic passed through each router are quite similar in nature. Therefore, the traffic features found in one router may equally applicable to other routers. Moreover, in each router we observed that, the set of flows has small intrinsic dimensionality. This reveals the fact that the behaviours of high dimensional flows can be well illustrated by some smaller independent components.