Detection of stationary network load increase using univariate network aggregate traffic data by dynamic PCA

Abstract

Network operators are now facing bandwidth outages as well as a growing pressure to ensure good Quality of Service (QoS). An important practical issue for network service providers is to pay close attention to the load changes of network traffic, in particular, the stationary increase of load from a normal demand. Many network monitoring applications and performance analysis tools are based on the study of an aggregate measure of network traffic, e.g. number of packets in transit (NPT), which is a long-term univariate time series. To classify this type of network traffic data and detect any increase of network source load, we propose a dynamic principal component analysis (PCA) method, first to extract data features and then to detect a stationary load increase of network traffic. The proposed detection schemes are based on either the major or the minor principal components of network traffic data. To demonstrate the applications of the proposed feature extraction method and the detection schemes, we applied them to network traffic data simulated from the packet switching network (PSN) model. Additionally, we propose a combined detection scheme that uses both the major and the minor principal components. The proposed detection schemes, based on dynamic PCA, show enhanced performance in detecting an increase of network load for the simulated network traffic data. These results offer a new feature extraction method based on dynamic PCA that creates additional feature variables for event detection in a univariate time series.