IRMACS: The Interdisciplinary Colloquium: "Mining Traffic Data"

Abstract

Statistical analysis and mining of network data are often employed to determine traffic distribution, to summarize a user's behavior patterns, or to predict future network traffic. In this talk, we analyze traffic data collected from three types of deployed networks: a satellite network used by Internet service providers, a cellular wireless network used by public safety agencies, and the Internet.

We employ statistical analysis to characterize traffic loads and distribution of applications and packet sizes in a hybrid satellite-terrestrial system. We investigate long-range dependence as the traffic patterns vary, propose a traffic model for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections, and use data from billing records to predict traffic.

We also analyze network log data collected from a deployed public safety trunked radio network that utilizes circuit-switched cellular wireless technology. We examine the statistical distribution and autocorrelation function of call inter-arrival and call holding times during busy hours. Our findings indicate that traditional Erlang models for voice traffic may not be suitable for evaluating the performance of trunked radio networks. We also apply clustering algorithms and identify clusters of talk groups that best reflect users' behavior patterns represented by the hourly number of calls.

Discovering Internet topology is important for analyzing routing protocols and Internet robustness and resilience. We examine Internet datasets from two sources (Route Views and RIPE) and employ normalized Laplacian analysis to identify cluster characteristics.

**** About Speaker: Ljiljana Trajkovic received the Dipl. Ing. degree from University of Pristina, Yugoslavia, the M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering from Syracuse University, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of California at Los Angeles.

She is currently a Professor in the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include high-performance communication networks and theory of nonlinear circuits and dynamical systems.

Dr. Trajkovic is currently serving as the 2008 Past President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and was a member of its Board of Governors (2004 - 2005 and 2001 - 2003). She also serve as the Vice President for Long-Range Planing and Finance of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society and served on its Board of Governors (2004 - 2006). She was Technical Program Co-Chair of ISCAS 2005 and Technical Program Chair and Vice General Co-Chair of ISCAS 2004. Dr. Trajkovic served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems (Part I and Part II) and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine.

Dr. Trajkovic is a Fellow of the IEEE.

**********