Analysis of Internet services in IP over ATM networks

Abstract

This paper presents a trace-driven analysis of IP over ATM services from a user-perceived quality of service standpoint. QoS parameters such as the sustained throughput for transactional services and other ATM layer parameters such as the burstiness (MBS) per connection are derived. On the other hand, a macroscopic analysis that comprises percentage of flows and bytes per service, TCP transaction duration and mean bytes transferred in both ways is also presented. The traffic trace is obtained with a novel measurement equipment that combines a header extraction hardware and a high end UNIX workstation capable of providing a timestamp accuracy in the order of microseconds. The ATM link under analysis concentrates traffic from a large population of 1,500 hosts from Public University of Navarra campus network, that produce 1,700,000 TCP connections approximately in the measurement period of one week. The results obtained from such a wealth of data suggest that QoS is primarily determined by transport protocols and not by ATM bandwidth. The sustained throughput of TCP connections never grows beyond 80 Kbps with 70% probability in the data transfer phase (i. e., in the ESTABLISHED state) and we observe a strong influence of the connection establishment phase in the user-perceived throughput. On the other hand, the burstiness of individual TCP connections is rather small, namely TCP connections do not produce bursts according to the geometric law given by slow start and commonly assumed in previously published studies.