Network Temperature: A Novel Statistical Index for Networks Measurement and Management

Abstract

Being able to monitor each packet path is critical for effective measurement and management of networks. However, such detailed monitoring can be very expensive especially for large-scale networks. To address such problem, inspired by thermodynamics, which uses the statistical characteristics of a large number of molecules’ motion but not each molecule’s trajectory for analysis, we propose the new concept of network temperature together with the notions of network-specific heat and network temperature gradient . Our approach does not only provide a statistical view of the current network state consisting of all the active packet paths at each time instant, but can be used to represent transitions among network states. Our network temperature-based methods have a broad applicability, such as to DDoS detection, dynamic node importance ranking, network stability and robustness evaluation, reliable packets routing, provenance compression assessment, and so on. Numerical and/or the experimental results show that our methods are effective.