VoIP Traffic Modelling Using Gaussian Mixture Models, Gaussian Processes and Interactive Particle Algorithms

The paper deals with an important problem in the Voice over IP (VoIP) domain, namely being able to understand and predict the structure of traffic over some given period of time. VoIP traffic has a time variant structure, e.g. due to sudden peaks, daily or weekly moving patterns of activities, which in turn makes prediction difficult. Obtaining insights about the structure and trends of traffic has important implications when dealing with the nowadays cloud-deployed VoIP services. Prediction techniques are applied to anticipate the incoming traffic, for an efficient distribution of the traffic in the system and allocation of resources. The article looks in a critical manner at a series of machine learning techniques. We namely compare and review (using real VoIP data) the results obtained when using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), Gaussian Processes (GP), and an evolutionary-like Interacting Particle Systems based (sampling) algorithm. The experiments consider different setups as to verify the time variant traffic assumption.