Traffic engineering eye diagram

Abstract

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words - this statement also applies to networking topics. Thus, to effectively monitor network performance we need tools which present the performance metrics in a graphical way which is also clear and informative. We propose a tool for this purpose which we call the traffic engineering eye diagram (TEED). Eye diagrams are used in digital communications to analyse the quality of a digital signal; the TEED can similarly he used in the traffic engineering field to analyse the load balancing ability of a TE algorithm. In this paper we describe how to create such TEEDs and how to use them to analyse and compare various traffic engineering approaches.