Routing and Capacity Optimization Based on Estimated Latent OD Traffic Demand

This paper introduces a method to estimate latent traffic from its origin to destination from the link packet loss rate and traffic volume. In addition, we propose a method for the joint optimization of routing and link provisioning based on the estimated latent traffic. Observed traffic could deviate from the original traffic demand and become latent when the traffic passes through congested links because of changes in user behavioral and/or applications as a result of degraded quality of experience (QoE). The latent traffic is actualized by improving congested link capacity. When link provisioning is based on observed traffic, actual traffic might cause new congestion at other links. Thus, network providers need to estimate the origin-destination (OD) original traffic demand for network planning. Although the estimation of original traffic has been well studied, the estimation was only applicable for links. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate latent OD traffic by combining and expanding techniques. The method consists of three steps. The first step is to estimate the actual OD traffic and loss rate from the actual traffic and packet loss rate of the links. The second step is to estimate the latent traffic demand. Finally, using this estimated demand, the link capacity and routing matrix are optimized. We evaluate our method by simulation and confirm that congestion could be avoided by capacity provisioning based on estimated latent traffic, while provisioning based on observed traffic retains the congestion. The combined method can avoid congestion with an increment of 23% compared with capacity provisioning only. We also evaluated our method's adaptability, i.e., the ability to estimate the required parameter for the estimations using fewer given values, but values obtained in the environment.