Randomising traffic flow by causing collisions between data packets

摘要

A traffic manipulation device 12 causes deliberate collisions between data packets on a (eg. Ethernet) network 10 in order to kill control packets and thus make the traffic flow more random (ie. conforming to a negative exponential Gaussian distribution) and therefore more straightforward to predict. Collisions may be caused at fixed intervals or with particular probabilistic properties in order to change the characteristics or parameters (eg. mean rate, standard deviation, Hurst parameter) of the data flow distribution, or to break up long bursts of packets which introduce small-scale structure to the distribution.