Ricerc@Sapienza

The MNEMONIC project focus on a specific task of the monitoring system of an Internet Service Provider (ISP): the computation of the Ingress Egress Traffic Matrix (TM). The knowledge of the TM is a key information for an ISP since it allows to implement effective Traffic Engineering algorithm so that to increase the Quality of Service provided to customers.
The main aim of MNEMONIC is to define a TM computation strategy for an ISP network characterized by the availability of computing nodes at network edges. The main features of the solution will be i) to exploit a customized data mining algorithm, ii) to run in a distributed fashion, and iii) to use as input data the raw traffic traces captured at network edge nodes. The proposed solution will have many advantages with respect to known solutions for traffic monitoring. Firstly, it will be completely transparent to network devices, since the packet capturing will be performed by computing nodes at network edges. Moreover, the MNEMONIC solution will be able to automatically extract Ingress Egress relationship for each captured packet, avoiding the interaction with the Routing management system required by legacy monitoring solutions. Finally, the MNEMONIC will define a very fast algorithm able to compute the TM on a second timescale, while minutes/hours are required by complex monitoring systems.
MNEMONIC will also provide as outcome an experimental testbed to be used as proof-of-concept for the algorithm proposed. The performance evaluation will focus on the execution times as a function of different network parameters (i.e. raw trace size, line rate, traffic distribution, hardware constraints). Moreover, the availability of an experimental testbed will allow to characterize the reliability of the solution, evaluating the reaction to unexpected events, such as sudden traffic variations and devices malfunctioning. Finally, the comparison with standard monitoring solutions will be provided.