Section: Scientific Foundations

High Speed Network's metrology

Participants : Paulo Gonçalves, Laurent Lefèvre, Thomas Begin, Matthieu Imbert, Shubhabraya Roy, Ashley Chonka, Anne-Cécile Orgerie, Ghislain Landry Tsafack.

Metrology of wide-area computer networks (i.e. the deployment of a series of tools allowing for collecting relevant information regarding the system status), is a discipline recently introduced in the context of networks, and which undergoes constant developments. In our case, this activity consists in measuring along time and space: (i) the nature and the amount of exchanged information between the constituents of a system ; (ii) the energy consumption by the different equipments of the system. In the one hand, it is then a matter of using the collected data to forecast the network load evolution, so as to dynamically anticipate congestion, and more widely, to guarantee a given application dependent Quality of Service. On the other hand, we strive at optimizing the resources usage from an energy efficiency viewpoint and at designing transport protocols for green networking.

We ground our approach on our large scale, fully controllable and configurable experimental facility (Grid5000$+$MetroFlux [53] $+$ShowWatts$+$WattM) to validate, to better understand and to extend anterior results that were either heuristically observed or theoretically derived. Conversely, we perform realistic experiments, under prescribed and reproducible conditions, to get new insights into the statistical specificities of internet traffic, and to precisely identify the role of the network parameters [52] .