Synthetic trace generation for the Internet
Weiguang Shi, Mike H. MacGregor, Paweł Gburzyński · 2001
1 Introduction It is well established that memory reference strings of computer programs exhibit spatial and temporal locality [1]. This locality is the motivating concept behind the use of instruction and data caches, which play a critical role in improving the performance of contemporary computer systems. In this paper, we apply the concepts of locality and workload modeling originally developed for investigating program memory references to the characterization of traces of Internet traffic. Internet routers use locally-stored routing tables to look up the correct outgoing interface for each incoming IP packet, based on the best match for the destination address extracted from its header. In this sense, the destination address is the index to the routing table, just as a virtual memory address is an index to the page directories and page tables. The sequence of destination addresses in the IP packet trace constituting the input to this lookup process exhibits both temporal and spatial locality. This similarity has been exploited, e.g., in [2], to accelerate routing table lookups by harnessing for this purpose the caching hardware used by virtual address translation.