Measuring interdependencies and transitivity of end to end traffic flows by traffic correlation

This paper shows that end to end traffic flows in a network that pass through disjoint paths affect each other. We refer to this as transitive relationship between traffic flows. We measure interdependencies among network elements by traffic correlation which leads to this transitive relationship between traffic flows. We show that the effect of transitive relationship becomes significant under certain congestion states in the network. This means that a problem might be present at a subset in the network but it´s affect will be visible somewhere else. We also show that special care has to be taken while collecting flow data (for cross correlation) considering the delay distribution of traffic flows.