Burst Assembly with Real IPv4 Data - Performance Assessement of Three Assembly Algorithms

Nuno M. Garcia1,2, Paulo P. Monteiro1,3, and Mrio M. Freire2

Siemens S.A., Amadora, Portugal IT-Networks and Multimedia Group, University of Beira Interior, Covilh, Portugal 3 Instituto de Telecomunicaes, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal {nuno.mgarcia, paulo.monteiro}@siemens.com, mario@di.ubi.pt
2 1

Abstract. This paper describes the generation of data bursts using real IPv4 data as input and compares the performance of the three aggregation algorithms. The profiles of bursts are studied, in particular the mean packet delay per burst and burst inter-arrival time followed by mean burst size and mean number of packets per burst. Observations are made regarding the identification of relations between bursts and packets for the studied data traces and assessed the performance of the aggregation algorithms under study. The conclusions are generalized to IPv6 traffic.

1 Introduction
Data packet aggregation process was initially proposed by Amstutz in 1983 [1] as a way to benefit from the statistical multiplexing effect, or as initially described, improved bandwidth efficiencies. This concept was later re-introduced in Optical Networks, contributing to the Optical Burst Switching Network paradigm, initially proposed by Qiao and Yoo around 1999 [2]. When referring to Optical Burst Switching (OBS), three major aggregation algorithms are used: time constrained; size constrained; both time / size constrained, also termed the hybrid algorithm. With the perspective increasing importance of burst switching, e.g. OBS, it is of great importance to assess the burst assembly algorithms performance under real traffic conditions. The performance of aggregation algorithms has already been studied for simulated traffic [3-5], namely for research in the area of burst assembly algorithms, QoS and burst traffic statistics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report regarding the evaluation of burst aggregation algorithms using real traffic input data. The algorithms under study were implemented in the Aggregation Simulator package designed in Java, and the simulator was fed with real IPv4 traffic data captured by NLARN [6] in several network sites in the United States of America. These collection sites are mostly universities and research centers, and thus, traffic nature is very heterogeneous. This data is stored in a time stamped header (.tsh)

This work has been partially funded by Fundao para a Cincia e a Tecnologia, Portugal, through the grant contract SFRH/BDE/15527/2004 and through CONDENSA Project contract POSI/EEA-CPS/60247/2004 and by Siemens S.A., Portugal.

Y. Koucheryavy, J. Harju, V.B. Iversen (Eds.): NEW2AN 2006, LNCS 4003, pp. 223 234, 2006. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006

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format, which contains the payload stripped IPv4 datagram (or packet, as we will refer to it in this document), time stamped in microseconds at their acquisition. The standard format of the .tsh data packet header is available in [7]. Although the algorithms were applied to all files (in a batch process running in several laboratory machines) only the relevant results are shown here. The performance of each algorithm was evaluated following a set of previously defined metrics. The paper also extrapolates the conclusions on the studied IPv4 to IPv6 data conversion, following the results in [8]. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the burst assembly algorithms; Section III discusses the metrics devised for assessment of the burst assembly algorithms; Section IV presents the assessment of the burst assembly algorithms and Section V presents main conclusions.

2 Burst Assembly Algorithms

Data packet aggregation is a process in which individual data packets are assembled together before the resulting burst is sent into the network structure. The packets in question may experience re-encapsulation (or not, depending on the supported scenario) and typically the nature and origin of the data packets under consideration is not relevant to the aggregation principle, as these may be Ethernet frames, ATM cells, IP packets, and so forth. The burst assembly process requires only the other end of the transmission link to run a complimentary burst disassembly process, retrieving the original constituent packets. In this study, IPv4 packets were used and no encapsulation of the assembled packets was performed. The disassembly mechanism should thus consider the first 20 bytes of the data burst to be an IPv4 header, and proceed to extract that packet from the aggregated data. This step is repeated until no data is left within the burst. If the network implements burst segmentation techniques, the last readable packet may be corrupt, and if so, it is discarded. Burst assembly algorithms are constraint driven, and fall into three categories: 1) Maximum Burst Size (MBS) [9] 2) Maximum Time Delay (MTD) [10] 3) Hybrid Assembly (HA) [11, 12] Other burst assembly algorithms, like the ones considering classes of services, build upon one of the aforementioned basic types. In the Maximum Burst Size (MBS) assembly algorithm, the incoming data packets are aggregated consecutively into a burst, until its size exceeds the defined threshold. When this occurs, the last data packet overflowing the current burst starts a new burst, while the current burst is transmitted into the network structure. The Maximum Time Delay (MTD) assembly algorithm was devised to prevent situations where, while using the MBS algorithm, the rate of incoming packets is so low or the arriving packets are so small, that it takes an unacceptable amount of time to fill up a single burst, resulting in excessive transmission delay for the aggregated packets. The MTD algorithm checks for the time difference between the head packet in the burst and the current local time. The burst is sent into the network as soon as that time difference exceeds the maximum delay time defined, independently of the size of the burst and of the number of packets it contains.

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If the traffic flow rate is too high or the incoming packets are big, the MTD algorithm may end up creating bursts that are too big. In order to prevent such a situation, a Hybrid Assembly (HA) algorithm was devised. In this assembly scheme, both thresholds time and size are considered simultaneously. Incoming packets are assembled into a new burst until one of the threshold conditions is met.

3 Burst Assembly Simulation Evaluation Metrics

Burst assembly was performed using a simulator designed in Java. The simulator reads .tsh input files and acts on each packet trace recording, in an event driven simulation. Simulation parameters were: name of .tsh input files (in particular, the name of the folder in which the input files were stored), burst assembly type (MBS, MTD, or HA), and burst assembly thresholds. The output provided includes burst details and the metrics defined in section 3.1. Due to the large number of processed files, the simulator was designed to perform batch processing of the input files. 3.1 Evaluation Metrics In recent literature, it is common to find burst sizes defined in time, which in turns allows for its measurement in bytes given a known data channel rate. Since we are using real IPv4 as tributary data for our research, the sizes are defined in bytes (B) and times are defined in microseconds (due to .tsh format limitations). For the burst itself, a suitable set of statistics was used: a) mean packet delay per burst b) mean number of packets per burst c) mean burst size d) mean burst inter-arrival time The mean packet delay per burst is important as it provides insight on the value of average delay that a single packet suffers from due to the very nature of the burst assembly mechanism. The acceptable delay for a single data packet is one of the main criteria when selecting an adequate burst assembly algorithm. This metric was calculated by averaging the delay occurred between the arrival time of each packet and its burst departure time, assumed to be the arrival time of the last packet in the burst. The mean packet number per burst additionally shows how much processing the disassembly (complimentary to the assembly process) mechanism needs to perform to forward individual packets, but primarily it demonstrates the amount of switching effort saved in the network structure due to the statistical multiplexing effect. While the mean burst size is important to determine the occupancy of the network, the mean burst inter-arrival time will provide insight as to the ratio at which the bursts flow in the network structure. Mean burst interarrival time was calculated averaging the delay occurred between two consecutive burst departures. One Way Delay, as defined in RFC 2679 [13] and IP Packet Delay Variation Metric, as defined in RFC 3393 [14] produced by the IETF IP Performance Metrics workgroup (IPPM) [15] were not adopted as these measure the performance of packet transmission for a given set of links (considering the transmission between source and destination), while we used particular network point packets arrival times.

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3.2 Burst Assembly Variables Burst Assembly was performed with several thresholds. Time thresholds used were 100s, 500s, 1ms, 10ms and 100ms and size thresholds used were 9KB, 64KB and 1MB. The first two constitute the maximum sizes of respectively the Ethernet Jumboframe and the IP packet. The third threshold was originally set to 4GB as consistent with the maximum size for an IPv6 Jumbogram [16], but it was soon discovered that even 1MB burst size required burst assembly times in excess of 1s (for MEM-1111612868-1.tsh), making the 4GB size threshold of little research interest. Hybrid aggregation was performed for the following six scenarios: size thresholds where 9KB and 64KB and time thresholds were 500s, 103s and 104s.

4 Results
The results presented were obtained by simulation for the burst assembly process executed for the following three randomly chosen traces: AMP-1107250616-1.tsh, ANL-1109366607-1.tsh and MEM-1111612868-1.tsh. AMP, ANL and MEM stand for AMPATH, Miami, Florida (OC12c), Argonne National Laboratory to STARTAP (OC3c link) and University of Memphis (OC3c link), respectively [17]. Other data trace files were also subject to simulation process, producing results coherent with the ones presented in this paper. Each of the examined trace files records the activity in the selected network point for about continuous 91 seconds. Table 1 shows the activity of each of these network points.
Table 1. Network Activity for the selected trace files

Packet load (in Bytes) Time Span (in s) Offered Load (in MB/s) 4.1 Results for MBS

AMP 876 301 540 89 836 840 9.754

ANL 246 923 708 90 921 971 2.716

MEM 159 669 572 91 918 790 1.737

Fig. 1 depicts the relative frequency of burst inter-arrival time for each of the studied data traces with the burst size threshold set to 9KB. As anticipated, the AMP data results in the lowest inter-arrival time plot, since 90% of the bursts arrive within 1555s or less and this trace contains the highest traffic load. For the other traces, the same limit is observed at 616 s and 12903s for ANL and MEM, respectively. It is worth noting that the plots do not share the same shape around 2500s ANL and MEM switch tendencies this suggests that burst inter-arrival time depends on the nature of the traffic on the network point where bursts are to be assembled. Fig. 1 does not present the whole burst inter-arrival scale: AMP reaches its maximum at 10001, ANL at 30038, and MEM at 55702s (for MEM, 99.95% of the burst arrive up until 35103s), respectively. The same behaviour is also visible for other size thresholds in all the studied traces.

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1.E+00

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1.E-01

1.E-02 AMP 1.E-03 ANL MEM

1.E-04

1.E-05 70 0 10000 20000 30000

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Fig. 1. Complementary Cumulative Distribution Function for Burst Inter-arrival Time for MBS threshold = 9KB
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1.E+05

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1.E+03

Threshold Values 9216 65536 1048576

1.E+02 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Network Load (in Mbytes/s)

Fig. 2. Weighted average burst inter-arrival time vs. network load (for MBS)

The comparison between burst inter-arrival times for different size thresholds lead to the conclusion that a 2 orders of magnitude increase in the burst size (from 9KB to 1MB) results in an increase of more than two orders of magnitude for the burst interarrival time. This situation is depicted in Fig. 2. It also shows the influence of network offered load on burst inter-arrival time. Here, it is assumed that the nature of the traffic in the three network points is comparable, and the offered throughput was calculated using values from Table 1. When the network load increases by a factor of 5, the average burst inter-arrival time decreases by an order of magnitude. This behaviour is also verified for several burst size thresholds.

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Fig. 3 depicts the average packet delay per burst for the MBS assembly scheme. When the size threshold is set to 9KB, the average packet delay per burst parameters are almost the same, for the studied data traces, diverging only when the size threshold increases. As anticipated, the higher load network point shows a lower packet average delay. The increase in the average packet delay when size threshold is increased from 9KB to 64KB is different for the data in AMP when compared to the data in ANL and MEM. ANL and MEM also here seem to follow a close behaviour, expectedly suggesting that when the link is more loaded, the MBS aggregation algorithm performs better in terms of average packet delay per burst. Accordingly with the definition of the burst assembly algorithm, burst size is very close to burst size threshold, and no graph is shown.
1.000.000,00

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1048576

Fig. 3. Average packet delay per burst for MBS

4.2 Results for MTD As expected, the average inter-arrival time between bursts is always higher than the time threshold defined for the burst assembly. Fig. 4 shows the relation between the weighted averages for the burst inter-arrival times for MTD plotted against burst assembly time threshold. It is clear that inter-arrival and threshold times converge when the later increase. AMP holds the lowest relation between inter-arrival and threshold times, thus performing better than ANL or MEM, which is a consequence of its higher traffic load. There is a quasi linear relation observed in all data traces between the number of packets present in bursts and the utilised time threshold, as shown in Fig. 5. As anticipated, the higher load traffic data yields a higher number of packets per burst, and the number of packets in bursts per data traces for AMP and ANL / MEM diverge as the time threshold increases. At a higher aggregation threshold value, there is

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almost an order of magnitude difference in the number of packets per burst between AMP and ANL / MEM. Burst Size depends on the MTD aggregation ratio since the faster the incoming packets arrive, the bigger the bursts are. Fig. 6 shows how data is aggregated into bursts of variable sizes when the time threshold is set to 104 s. In line with well known results [3, 18], we can see that the burst size distribution resembles a Gaussian shape when the number of bursts increases, which happens when we consider the MEM trace, following the Law of Large Numbers. The plot character for each data trace is different, even for sources with comparable traffic load such as ANL and MEM. This result suggests that the bigger the load of the aggregated traffic, the more the burst size distribution tends to the Normal distribution. The Normal distribution nature of some of the characteristics of the aggregated bursts is also visible when the packet count per burst is plotted. For burst assembly time of 105 s, bursts contain from 88 to 1887 packets following a distribution close to the one depicted in Fig. 6. Fig. 7 shows the results when time was set to 100 s (the lower end of the chosen burst assembly threshold scale). At this burst assembly threshold, only high intensity traffic sources achieve bursts with more than 16 packets (the maximum was one burst in AMP which contained 21 packets). This figure shows the complementary cumulative distribution function of packets in bursts for this particular burst assembly scenario. Here, bursts containing up to three packets account for 78.5% of the traffic with AMP, 95.1% with ANL and 98.3% with MEM trace files. The average packet delay for MTD is shown in Fig. 8. Note that the average packet delay converges to the burst assembly threshold when it is higher than 103s. Additionally, low load traces (ANL and MEM) show better performance for MTD in terms of average packet delay than AMP; in case of low time thresholds, MEM performs almost twice better than AMP, possibly because bursts contain fewer packets.
100000 s

W ig e d A ra e B rst In ra e h te ve g u te rriva T e l im

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Fig. 4. Burst Inter-arrival Time vs. Burst Assembly (Aggregation) Time for MTD

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10000

1000 N m e o P cke inB rsts u b r f a ts u

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10 AMP ANL MEM 1 100

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Fig. 5. Number of Packets in Bursts vs. Burst Assembly (Aggregation) Thresholds for MTD
4000 3500 3000 Burst Count 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0
10001-20000 20001-30000 30001-40000 40001-50000 50001-60000 60001-70000 70001-80000 80001-90000 90001-100000 100001-110000 110001-120000 120001-130000 130001-140000 140001-150000 150001-160000 160001-170000 170001-180000 180001-190000 190001-200000 200001-210000 210001-220000 220001-230000 230001-240000 250001-260000 1-10000

AMP ANL MEM

Burst Size Interval (in Bytes)

Fig. 6. Burst Size Histogram for MDT when time = 104 s

100.0000% AMP ANL
Complementary Cumulative D istribution

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MEM

1.0000%

0.1000%

0.0100%

0.0010%

0.0001% 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
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Fig. 7. Number of Packets in Bursts Relative Distribution for MTD = 100 s

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1.E+05 (s)

1.E+04 Weighted Average Packet Delay

1.E+03

1.E+02

1.E+01

AMP ANL MEM

1.E+00 100 1000 Aggregation Thresholds 10000 100000 (s)

Fig. 8. Packets Delay (average) in Bursts vs. Aggregation Thresholds

4.3 Results for HA The Hybrid Assembly algorithm combines two thresholds - time and size. Fig. 9 shows the packet inter-arrival time for three data traces, for each HA scenario. The tendency depicted in Fig. 9 remains when regarding packet delay time per burst. It is clear that ANL and MEM behave similarly, and for burst assembly times below 103s inclusive, and the performance of the HA is almost constant regardless of whether the burst size threshold is set to 9KB or 64KB. AMP performs better probably because of its higher packet load and performs best with time threshold of 104s and burst size 9KB than with time of 103s. This behaviour may be related to the change in the burst assembly threshold (from size to time or vice-versa). This hypothesis is confirmed by the plot of Fig. 10. Here, the nice dragon-like shape of the plot exhibits several interesting features of the HA algorithm. The data plotted for values of bursts 7500 bytes (approximately) show the effect of the size constrained branch of the algorithm these were the bursts that contain fast incoming packets (they were very close together in time so the time threshold was never reached). It is also visible that these bursts are responsible for a major share of the output stream (bursts whose size is bigger than 7500 bytes account for 74.70% of the total bursts count). The lump shapes on Fig. 10 are a well know phenomena related to the size distribution of IPv4 packets [8]. 1500 bytes long IPv4 packets are very common in data traces, supposedly because of path and/or link MTU issues, and also, as a consequence of the popularity of IP over Ethernet encapsulation scheme. This graph shows local modes near the multiples of 1500 bytes, namely 1500, 3000, 4500, 6000, 7500 and finally 9000 bytes. Note that 75% of the bursts in this scenario have 7500

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10100

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Fig. 9. Burst Inter-arrival Time vs. Aggregation Scenarios for HA

1000

100 Burst Count 10

1 0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 Burst Size (in Bytes)

Fig. 10. Burst Size Histogram for HA (T=103 s, S= 9 KB) on AMP data

bytes or more, which is in line with results, in particular the ones depicted in Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 considering MTD. This behaviour is also visible in other data traces and in other aggregation scenarios.

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5 Conclusions
The assessment of the performance of burst assembly algorithms using real IPv4 data allows for the following conclusions: 1. globally, from all the studied scenarios for the burst assembly algorithms, both MTD and HA outperform MBS in terms of delay added to the burst and/or to the packet in the burst. Therefore, as the assembly of large size bursts results in high inter-arrival times and packet delay per burst, these large bursts should only be considered for transmitting data that is not time critical, such as news server synchronization or data backup between servers. The size threshold is dependent of the traffic load on the input link, typically being bigger than 1MB for these data traces; 2. the performance of the burst assembly algorithms is also a function of the network point where the data is to be assembled, as different network sites show different performances. This feature is visible in all examined burst assembly algorithms, and several threshold values may have to be studied to reach a sustained optimum performance for a specific network point. Thus, for an optimum operation regarding the compromise between large bursts and low mean packet delay in a burst, burst assembly algorithms thresholds or combinations of thresholds have to be dynamically set to adjust to time changing traffic conditions; 3. as IPv6 packet sizes and flow rates are expected to follow current IPv4 models, following the research presented in [8] we can expect similar results for the assembly of IPv6 packets into bursts. Acknowledgments. The authors would like to thank Marek Hajduczenia and Pedro Incio for their support and many valuable discussions.

References
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