Flow-aggregation Accelerating Strategy for TCP Traffic

Abstract

A great number of researches on network flow characteristics show a large proportion of the network flows are single-packet flows. However, almost all existing flow termination strategies have no optimization for single-packet flows, so the efficiency of flow-aggregation is lower. Based on in-depth study of flow characteristics and TCP protocol specifications, we find the packet status, packet arrival interval and SYN packet size can identify single-packet flows accurately, and then propose a flow-aggregation accelerating strategy for TCP traffic that aims to quickly identify single-packet flows. We build efficiency model and accuracy model to compare our strategy performance with others and make a lot of experiments on the traces collected from a main channel in the CERNET during the latest five years. The results prove our strategy can greatly improve the efficiency of flow-aggregation at the cost of very little loss of accuracy