Accurate traffic matrix completion based on multi-Gaussian models

Traffic matrix (TM) describes the volumes of traffic between a set of sources and destinations in a network. As an important parameter, TMs are used in a variety of network engineering tasks, such as traffic engineering, capacity planning and anomaly detection. However, it is a challenge to reliably measure TMs in practice. For example, due to flaws in the measurement systems and possible failure in data collection systems, missing values are unavoidable. It is important to recover the missing data from the partial direct measurements. Existing matrix completion methods do not fully consider network traffic behavior and traffic hidden characteristic. Their completion accuracy tends to be significantly worse when the data loss rate is high. In this paper, we perform a study on intrinsic characteristics of network traffic by analyzing real-world traffic trace data, which reveals that traffic has the features of temporal stability and spatial affinity. According to traffic spatial feature, we model TM as multi-Gaussian distributions, which describes the actual network traffic more accurately. Furthermore, we propose a novel matrix completion method based on multi-Gaussian models to estimate the missing traffic data. Finally, we utilize traffic temporal characteristic to further optimize traffic matrix completion for the missing data interpolation. Our proposed approach has been evaluated utilizing real-world traffic trace data. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significantly better performance compared with the state-of-the-art interpolation methods.