An Evaluation of Traffic Matrix Estimation Techniques for Large-Scale IP Networks

The information on the volume of traffic flowing between all possible origin and destination pairs in an IP network during a given period of time is generally referred to as traffic matrix (TM). This information, which is very important for various traffic engineering tasks, is very costly and difficult to obtain on large operational IP network, consequently it is often inferred from readily available link load measurements.;In this thesis, we evaluated 5 TM estimation techniques, namely Tomogravity (TG), Entropy Maximization (EM), Quadratic Programming (QP), Linear Programming (LP) and Neural Network (NN) with gravity and worst-case bound (WCB) initial estimates. We found that the EM technique performed best, consistently, in most of our simulations and that the gravity model yielded better initial estimates than the WCB model. A hybrid of these techniques did not result in considerable decrease in estimation errors. We, however, achieved most significant reduction in errors by combining iterative proportionally-fitted estimates with the EM technique. Therefore, we propose this technique as a viable approach for estimating the traffic matrix of large-scale IP networks.