End-to-End Network Traffic Reconstruction Via Network Tomography Based on Compressive Sensing

Traffic matrices (TM) represent the volumes of end-to-end network traffic between each of the origin–destination pairs. Accurate estimates of TM are used by network operators to perform network management functions and traffic engineering tasks. Despite a large number of methods devoted to the problem of traffic matrix estimation, the inference of end-to-end network traffic is still a main challenge in the large-scale IP backbone network, due to an ill-posed nature of itself. In this paper, we focus on the problem of end-to-end network traffic reconstruction. Based on the network tomography method, we propose a simple method to estimate end-to-end network traffic from the aggregated data. By analyzing, in depth, the properties of the network tomography method, compressive sensing reconstruction algorithms are put forward to overcome the ill-posed nature of the network tomography model. In this case, to satisfy the technical conditions of compressive sensing, we propose a modified network tomography model. Besides, we give a further discussion that the proposed model follows the constraints of compressive sensing. Finally, we validate our method by real data from the Abilene and GÉANT backbone networks.