Detection of traffic changes in large-scale backbone networks: The case of the Spanish academic network

Network management systems produce a huge amount of data in large-scale networks. For example, the Spanish academic network features hundreds of access and backbone links, each of which produces a link utilization time series. For the purpose of detecting relevant changes in traffic load a visual inspection of all such time series is required. As a result, the operational expenditure increases. In this paper, we present an on-line change detection algorithm to identify the relevant change points in link utilization, which are presented to the network manager through a graphical user interface. Consequently, the network manager only inspects those links that show a stationary and statistically significant change in the link load.