Help us improve your experience.

Let us know what you think.

Do you have time for a two-minute survey?

 
 

Input Interface Traffic

The interface traffic file can have one of the following two formats.

Interface Traffic File Format

The period data (Per1, Per2, ... Pern) indicates the traffic measured on the interface over several consecutive periods. By default, the units is in bits per second. Note that the number of periods is not limited to 24.

Before running the Traffic Matrix Solver, you will be asked to choose the desired period of traffic that the Traffic Matrix tool should try to match when generating its traffic matrix solution.

Note:

For your reference, the first two lines of the ingress or egress interface traffic files usually indicate the collection time for the first period of data and the interval (e.g. 5 minutes) between periods, as shown in the following example.

Example Interface Traffic File

  • After opening the network project, select Traffic > Import Traffic to open the Import Traffic Wizard to convert data from third-party measurements, such as MRTG, InfoVista, Concord eHealth, into NorthStar Planner’s format.

  • Specify the interface traffic file to use for the traffic matrix computation by switching to View or Design mode. Go to File>Read, click on the “Network Files” tab, scroll down to the “Traffic Files” section of the window, and click on either the “egress” (outgoing interface traffic) or “ingress” (incoming interface traffic) entry. If both files are specified, the egress file’s value will be checked first. If the value is unspecified in the egress file, the ingress file will then be checked. Browse for the desired file on the server, and click the blue arrow icon to load it into your network model.

  • Once you have loaded the file into your network model and saved your network environment (via File>Save Network...), the ingress and egress traffic files will be saved and available the next time you open that network project, or specification file.

Figure 1: Load an Egress FileLoad an Egress File

Input TrafficLoad File

For a subset of the flows in the network, you may already have measured end-to-end flow bandwidth, e.g., from Netflow, JFlow, LDP statistics data, or other sources. In this case, you can specify the measured flow bandwidth through the trafficload file. The format is as follows:

After opening the network model, select Traffic > Import Traffic to import data from third-party systems such as Netflow 9 xml, Arbor xml, TMS, and Juniper LDP Stat, into NorthStar Planner file format.

Make sure that the demand ID here matches that of the demand file.