Large-Scale Characterization and Segmentation of Internet Path Delays with Infinite HMMs

Maxime Mouchet (1, 2) , Sandrine Vaton (1, 2) , Thierry Chonavel (1, 3) , Emile Aben (4) , Jasper den Hertog (4)

1 Lab-STICC - Laboratoire des sciences et techniques de l'information, de la communication et de la connaissance
2 IMT Atlantique - INFO - Département Informatique
3 IMT Atlantique - SC - Département Signal et Communications
4 RIPE NCC - Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre [Amsterdam]

Round-Trip Times are one of the most commonly collected performance metrics in computer networks. Measurement platforms such as RIPE Atlas provide researchers and network operators with an unprecedented amount of historical Internet delay measurements. It would be very useful to automate the processing of these measurements (statistical characterization of paths performance, change detection, recognition of recurring patterns, etc.). Humans are pretty good at finding patterns in network measurements but it can be difficult to automate this to enable many time series being processed at the same time. In this article we introduce a new model, the HDP-HMM or infinite hidden Markov model, whose performance in trace segmentation is very close to human cognition. This is obtained at the cost of a greater complexity and the ambition of this article is to make the theory accessible to network monitoring and management researchers. We demonstrate that this model provides very accurate results on a labeled dataset and on RIPE Atlas and CAIDA MANIC data. This method has been implemented in Atlas and we introduce the publicly accessible Web API.

Mots clés: Nonparametric Bayesian Models; RIPE Atlas; Anomaly Detection; Hidden Markov Models; Round-Trip Times; Time Series Clustering

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]; Machine Learning [stat.ML]

Maxime Mouchet, Sandrine Vaton, Thierry Chonavel, Emile Aben, Jasper den Hertog. Large-Scale Characterization and Segmentation of Internet Path Delays with Infinite HMMs. 2019. ⟨hal-02326926v1⟩