Flash crowd mitigation via an adaptive admission control based on application-level measurement

Xuan Chen and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

We propose the network early warning system (NEWS) to protect servers and networks from flash crowds, which usually happen when too many requests are sent to a web site simultaneously. NEWS is an self-tuning admission control mechanism, which imposes application-level congestion control (AppCC) between requests and responses. NEWS detects flash crowds from changes in web response rate. Based on the application-level observations, NEWS adjusts the admitted request rate automatically and adaptively. Simulation results show that NEWS detects flash crowds within 10 minutes (about 2-3 detection intervals). By delaying 56% of requests, NEWS is able to reduce the packet drop rate for responses from 17% to 1%. The aggregated response rate for admitted requests is twice as fast with NEWS as compared to without. This performance is similar to the best possible rate limiter.

Availability

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Reference

Chen02a

Xuan Chen and John Heidemann. Flash crowd mitigation via an adaptive admission control based on application-level measurement. Technical Report ISI-TR-557, USC/Information Sciences Institute, May, 2002. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Chen02a.html>.

@techreport{Chen02a,
	author = "Xuan Chen and John Heidemann",
	title = "Flash crowd mitigation via an adaptive admission control based on application-level measurement",
	institution = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	year = "2002",
	number = "ISI-TR-557",
	month = "May",
	keywords = "NEWS, admission control, congestion control",
	otherurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~xuanc/paper/news.pdf",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Chen02a.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Chen02a.pdf",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

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