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Ad Hoc Wireless Network TrafficSelf-Similarity and Forecasting

Qilian Liang, Member, IEEE
AbstractLots of works have been done for the self-similarity of ethernet and world wide web traffic. In this letter, we study the ad hoc wireless network traffic collected in ad hoc network (AHN) testbed and show that the ad hoc wireless network traffic are self-similar, which validate that AHN traffic is forecastable because self-similar time-series can be forecasted. We apply a fuzzy logic system to ad hoc wireless network traffic forecasting and simulation results show that it performs much better than does an LMS adaptive filter. All these studies are very important for evaluating network capacity and determining the battery power mode based on the forecasted traffic workload. Index TermsAd hoc networks, fuzzy logic systems, network traffic, self-similarity.

widely used to verify self-similarity of time-series. Since the AHN traffic is self-similar, its characteristics can be captured. We apply a fuzzy logic system to AHN traffic forecasting. All these studies are very important for evaluating network capacity and determining the battery power mode based on the forecasted traffic workload. In the following sections, the self-similarity of AHN traffic is studied in Section II; the AHN traffic forecasting is presented in Section III; and conclusions and future works are provided in Section IV. II. SELF-SIMILARITY OF AD HOC NETWORK TRAFFIC

I. INTRODUCTION ECENTLY, it has been observed that ethernet video/ voice/data traffic have self-similarity [2], [3], [8]. According to Stallings [7], Self-similarity is such an important concept that, in a way, it is surprising that only recently has it been applied to data communications traffic analysis. and Since 1993, a number of studies reported in the literature have documented that the pattern of data traffic is well modeled by self-similar processes in a wide variety of real-world networking situations. Such self-similarity is quite common in both natural and man-made phenomena [7] such as the distribution of earthquakes, ocean waves, fluctuation of the stock market. But the self-similarity of ad hoc network (AHN) traffic has not been studied. AHNs are self-organizing entities that are deployed on demand in support of various events including collaborative computing, multimedia classroom, disaster relief, search and rescue and interactive mission planning. ) ad hoc wireless netWe implemented an -hop ( work testbed and collected the AHN traffic in bytes/25 ms. We collected total incoming traffic data to one node for 12.5 min when an MPEG video star wars was accessed and played. Besides the regular video traffic (TCP HTTP), there are some other control traffic (PING Reply, IP TCP, IP UDP, IP, etc). Since there are some buffers, traffic shaping, and control traffic in the AHN, the traffic size is not the same as that of the stored video. We observed that the AHN traffic is very bursty (different in bytes/25 ms versus time). In this letter, we show that the ad hoc wireless network traffic has self-similarity using variance-time plotting, a common statistical method which has been
Manuscript received March 13, 2001. The associate editor coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for publication was Prof. I. S. Venieris. The author is with the Hughes Network Systems, Inc., San Diego, CA 92121 USA (e-mail: qliang@hns.com). Publisher Item Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2002.801327.

For a detailed discussion on self-similarity in time-series, see [7], [8]. Here we briefly present its definition [1]. Given a zero, we demean, stationary time-series fine the -aggregated series by summing the original series over nonoverlapping blocks of size . Then its said that is -self-similar, if, for all poshas the same distribution as rescaled by . itive , That is (1)

If

-self-similar, it has the same autocorrelation function as the series for all , which means that the series is distributionally self-similar: the distribution of the aggregated series is the same as that of the original. Self-similar processes can show long-range dependence. A process with long-range dependence has an autocorrelation as , where . The function degree of self-similarity can be expressed using Hurst param. For self-similar series with long-range eter . As , the degree of both dependence, self-similarity and long-range depence increases. One method that has been widely used to verify self-similarity is the variance-time plot, which relies on the slowly decaying variance of a self-similar series. The variance of is plotted against on a loglog plot and a straight line with slope ( ) greater than 1 is indicative of self-similarity and . We use this method the parameter is given by against in this paper. In Fig. 1, we plot the variance of on a log-log plot for AHN traffic during 12.5 minutes. From this figure, its very clear that the ad hoc wireless network traffic has self-similarity because its trace has slope much greater than 1.

is

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Fig. 1. The variance-time plot for AHN traffic during 12.5 min. The traffic sizes are recorded in bytes/25 ms.

Fig. 2. AHN traffic for 25 s. The traffic workload sizes are based on every 25 ms, x(1); x(2); . . . ; x(1000).

III. FORECASTING AD HOC WIRELESS NETWORK TRAFFIC Since the AHN traffic is self-similar, its characteristics can be captured. We applied a fuzzy logic system to AHN traffic forecasting. We designed a fuzzy logic system (FLS) with 16 rules for AHN traffic modeling. The parameters associated with each rule are determined based on the first 500-unit network traffic and the steepest descent algorithm is used to optimize the parameters. We used the tuned FLS to forecast the network traffic following the training traffic. 500-unit network traffic are used for testing and the forecasting performances are evaluated in terms of root-mean square error. A. Overview of Fuzzy Logic Systems (FLSs) When an input is applied to a FLS, the inference engine computes the output set corresponding to each rule. The defuzzifer then computes a crisp output from these rule output sets. Consider a -input 1-output FLS, using singleton fuzzification, height defuzzification [5] and IF-THEN rules of the form IF is F and is F and and is F THEN is G

FLSs have been extensively used in time-series forecasting (e.g., [4]). The time-series they studied are MackeyGlass chaotic time-series, where the training sequence and testing sequence are almost in the same value range. Here, we apply FLS to real-world time-series, AHN traffic, where the training sequence and testing sequence are not in the same range, for example, the testing sequence may be within [200, 1500], but the testing sequence may range [10, 2000]. B. Simulations points, Our simulations were based on . The first 500 data, , are for training and the remaining 500 data, are for testing. By this means, the self-similarities and long range dependencies have been used. In Fig. 2, we plot the AHN traffic size data that we used for training and testing, . , We used four antecedents for forecasting, i.e., , and were used to predict . The rules are designed such as IF is F and is F and is F and is F THEN

Assuming singleton fuzzification, when an input is applied, the degree of firing corresponding to the th rule is computed as (2) where and both indicate the chosen -norm. There are many kinds of defuzzifiers. In this letter, we focus, for illustrative purposes, on the height defuzzifier [5]. It computes a crisp output for the FLS by first obtaining the height, , of every consequent set and, then computing a weighted average of these heights. The weight corresponding to the th rule consequent height is the de, so that gree of firing associated with the th rule,

is G

(3)

where

is the number of rules in the FLS.

In this letter, we use height defuzzifier [5], the height of is . As in [4], we used only two fuzzy sets for each antecedent, so . Gaussian membership functions the number of rules is (MFs) were chosen for the antecedents of the FLS. The initial and locations of antecedent MFs were based on the mean, . std, , of the first 500 points, For the antecedent Gaussian MFs, intially we chose mean: or , standard deviation: and be a random number within [0, height of consequent set 1000], so we have a total of 144 parameters. Then we used steepest descent algorithm to train these parameters based on the training data. After training, the rules were fixed and we tested the FL forecaster based on the remaining 500 points, .

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the FLS is very promising for real-time forecasting where more than one epoch of tuning is not possible. The capacity to forecast real-time traffic workload makes power management and resource allocation more convenient. IV. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS Lots of works have been done for the self-similarity of ethernet and world wide web traffic. In this paper, we study the ad hoc wireless network traffic collected in AHN testbed and show that the ad hoc wireless network traffic are self-similar, which validate that AHN traffic is forecastable because self-similar time-series can be forecasted. We apply a fuzzy logic system to ad hoc wireless network traffic forecasting and simulation results show that it performs much better than does an LMS adaptive filter. All these studies are very important for evaluating network capacity and determining the battery power mode based on the forecasted traffic workload, which are the future works that we will investigate. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author would like to thank N. Neigus, M. Read and J. Dharmawan at Hughes Network Systems, San Diego, CA, for collecting the traffic data, which made the simulations possible. REFERENCES
[1] M. E. Crovella and A. Bestavros, Self-similarity in world wide web traffic: Evidence and possible causes, IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking, vol. 5, pp. 835846, Dec. 1997. [2] M. W. Garrett and W. Willinger, Analysis, modeling and generation of self-similar VBR video traffic, in SIGCOMM94, London, U.K., August 1994, pp. 269280. [3] W. E. Leland, M. S. Taqqu, W. Willinger, and D. V. Wilson, On the self-similar nature of ethernet traffic, IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking, vol. 2, pp. 115, Feb. 1994. [4] Q. Liang and J. M. Mendel, Interval type-2 fuzzy logic systems: Theory and design, IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Systems, vol. 8, pp. 535551, Oct. 2000. [5] J. M. Mendel, Fuzzy logic systems for engineering: A tutorial, Proc. IEEE, vol. 83, pp. 345377, Mar. 1995. [6] A. Sinha and A. Chandrakasan, Dynamic power management in wireless sensor networks, IEEE Design Test Comput., vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 6274, Mar.Apr. 2001. [7] W. Stallings, High-Speed Networks: TCP/IP and ATM Design Principles. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1998. [8] W. Willinger, M. S. Taqqu, R. Sherman, and D. V. Wilson, Self-similarity through high-variability: Statistical analysis of ethernet LAN traffic at the source level, IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking, vol. 5, pp. 7186, Feb. 1997.

Fig. 3. The mean of the RMSEs (for the test data) for the FLS and LMS adaptive filter in AHN traffic forecasting, averaged over 50 Monte Carlo realizations. Tuning was performed in each realization for 5 epochs.

We compared the performance of our FLS with that of LMS adaptive filter used by Sinha and Chandrakasan [6] for AHN traffic forecasting. We chose 20 taps for LMS adaptive filter. For each of the two above methods, we ran 50 Monte Carlo realizations to eliminate the randomness of the parameters and the FLS was tuned using a simple steepest-descent algorithm for 5 epochs. After each epoch, we used the testing data to see how each FLS performed by evaluating the root-mean-squareerror (RMSE) between the defuzzified output of the FLS and ], i.e., the actual traffic sizes [

where and denotes transpose. RMSE values for each design, Since there are we summarize the mean of the RMSEs for each epoch and for each design in Fig. 3. Observe the following from the figure. 1) The FLS outperforms the LMS adaptive filter in AHN traffic forecasting. 2) The FLS achieves close to their optimal performance almost at the first epoch of tuning. This property shows that