Quality monitoring of network traffic forecasts using statistical process control

The literature of network traffic analysis has investigated different forecasting methods applied to traffic engineering in computer and communication networks. Several sophisticated models have been proposed, evaluated and compared, showing very good results in many empirical or controlled studies. In general, network traffic forecasting can be conducted in an offline or online manner. An important aspect in both approaches is the quality control of the obtained predictions. This paper is focused on the quality control of online network traffic forecasts. We present a statistical process control based approach in order to keep in control online predictions of different network traffics. Our proposal is based on a combination of CUSUM and Shewhart control charts. We evaluate the proposed method using four different traffic samples collected from real LAN, MAN e WAN network environments.