Bell Labs' Discovery May Lead to Efficient Networks

Thu Jun 7 16:22:26 UTC 2001

There had been reports of this discover about four years ago -- as
I recall, Tony Li reported hearing from customers that traffic levels at
the core were remarkably stable.

I had some talks with various of the self-similarity experts at the time
and they said this was perfectly plausible -- the law of large numbers
eventually says this must happen, the self-similarly results simply implied
that the amount of traffic required to reach stability was *much* larger
than required if traffic was Poisson.  At the core, we've apparently
reached that point.

My recollection of the discussions is that there's a lot of interesting
work to be done on the structure of those stable flows (what's going on
within the aggregate) as well as working out where the traffic gets small
enough to become self-similar.  But these discussions were a few years ago
and my memory may be faulty.

Craig

In message <0C875DC28791D21192CD00104B95BFE70146DD09 at BGSLC02>, Irwin Lazar writ
es:

>
>FYI: Bell Labs recently conducted an analysis of the nature of Internet
>traffic.  Some pretty interesting findings. 
>
>http://Networking.ittoolbox.com/browse.asp?c=NetworkingNews&r=/news/dispnews
>.asp?i=44100
>
>Through the use of sophisticated new software programs that analyzed and
>simulated data traffic in "unprecedented detail," Bell Labs researchers
>found that the "burstiness" seen in traffic at the edges of the Internet
>disappears at the core. The discovery that traffic on heavily loaded,
>high-capacity network links is unexpectedly regular may point the way to
>more efficient system and network designs with better performance at lower
>cost, Bell Labs said. 