Empirical Assessment of VoIP Overload Detection Tests

The control of communication networks critically relies on procedures capable of detecting unanticipated load changes. In this paper, the authors explore such techniques, in a setting in which each connection consumes roughly the same amount of bandwidth (with VoIP as a leading example). They focus on large-deviations based techniques developed earlier in that monitor the number of connections present, and that issue an alarm when this number abruptly changes. The procedures proposed are demonstrated by using real traces from an operational environment. Their experiments show that their detection procedure is capable of adequately identifying load changes.