Traffic measurements in IP networks

How do you get a comprehensive picture of the traffic in your network? How do you analyze the traffic flows to understand the behaviour of the customers? How do you interpret results from Internet interview based investigations? And how do you collect and present this analysis to draw conclusions for network management? Acreo has a long experience in dealing with these issues.

Research on Internet traffic and its evolution

Through our large contact network of national and international operators and other players in the telecom world, we get access to detailed traffic data for analysis. We have solid experience with analyzing data on packet, flow and application level. These statistics can be used as basis for business and network management decisions, as well as for research on Internet traffic and its evolution.

On going research project

The main objective of IPNQSIS is to develop continuous monitoring systems to study the behaviour of Quality of Experience (QoE) through the analysis of network and service performance and their impact on end customers.

Main Focus

The uppermost novelty of IPNQSIS is that both the customer perception and network performance will be taken up as the main driver for building a complete Customer Experience Management System (CEMS). The QoE will be fed from multi-technology network devices, such as probes, that will be developed and evaluated in the project. Deep packet and deep flow inspection techniques will be applied to monitor and analyze IP traffic in access networks in order to propose new techniques for distribution of multimedia content for cost-efficient solutions to maintain acceptable levels of QoE. In summary, algorithms, and measurements devices will be developed and tested to provide feedback to the control system. Furthermore, cognitive software will be developed to combine QoE-QoS correlation analysis with network operation and traffic modelling studies. All these elements constitute the Customer Experience Management (CEM) architecture that is the main outcome of this project.

Read more about the project IPNQSIS

European research projects

Much of the work in the area is performed within European research projects. An example of one successful project, coordinated by Acreo is the Celtic TRAMMS project. TRAMMS involved measurements and analysis of traffic in live networks, as well as development of tools for measuring traffic and QoS parameters. The project won the Celtic award of excellence in gold 2010 for its achievements. Further it was nominated to the Sweden broadband award 2010.

Results

More information on the project results may be found at the project web site: Projects.celtic-initiative.org/tramms/.

Celtic Innovation Award

In February 2012, the project TRAMMS was nominated as one of three final candidates to the new Celtic Innovation Award.

The award was created to acknowledge the actual industrial market impacts of Celtic projects results.

The scope of the award is to reward already finished projects with strong industrial impact, e.g. in the form of:

- new successful products now on the market, which can be traced back to project outcome,

- new business lines, new services, new jobs, high return of investment created or originated from project results

- impact on standardisation or implementation of new technologies, developed to a large degree within a project

- impact for European industry strengthening the technological position in Europe.