Traffic chaotic dynamics modeling and analysis of deterministic network

Abstract

Network traffic is an important and direct acting factor of network reliability and performance. To understand the behaviors of network traffic, chaotic dynamics models were proposed and helped to analyze nondeterministic network a lot. The previous research thought that the chaotic dynamics behavior was caused by random factors, and the deterministic networks would not exhibit chaotic dynamics behavior because of lacking of random factors. In this paper, we first adopted chaos theory to analyze traffic data collected from a typical deterministic network testbed — avionics full duplex switched Ethernet (AFDX, a typical deterministic network) testbed, and found that the chaotic dynamics behavior also existed in deterministic network. Then in order to explore the chaos generating mechanism, we applied the mean field theory to construct the traffic dynamics equation (TDE) for deterministic network traffic modeling without any network random factors. Through studying the derived TDE, we proposed that chaotic dynamics was one of the nature properties of network traffic, and it also could be looked as the action effect of TDE control parameters. A network simulation was performed and the results verified that the network congestion resulted in the chaotic dynamics for a deterministic network, which was identical with expectation of TDE. Our research will be helpful to analyze the traffic complicated dynamics behavior for deterministic network and contribute to network reliability designing and analysis.