tpprof: A Network Traffic Pattern Profiler

When designing, understanding, or optimizing a computer network, it is often useful to identify and rank common patterns in its usage over time. Often referred to as a network traffic pattern, identifying the patterns in which the network spends most of its time can help ease network operators' tasks considerably. Despite this, extracting traffic patterns from a network is, unfortunately, a difficult and highly manual process.

In this paper, we introduce tpprof, a profiler for network traffic patterns. tpprof is built around two novel abstractions: (1) network states, which capture an approximate snapshot of network link utilization and (2) traffic pattern sub-sequences, which represent a finite-state automaton over a sequence of network states. Around these abstractions, we introduce novel techniques to extract these abstractions, a robust tool to analyze them, and a system for alerting operators of their presence in a running network.