Impact and Implication of the Growth in Residential User-to-User Traffic

Paper Review: The Impact and Implication of the Growth in Residential
User-to-User Traffic

The paper reports aggregated traffic measurements collected from seven
ISPs in Japan. Their study is significantly large and their
measurements are claimed to cover 42% of backbone traffic in Japan.
Recent studies have been suggesting that peer-to-peer traffic
comprises a majority of Internet traffic today. This paper attempts
to validate that claim. They, however, look at residential
user-to-user traffic rather than strictly peer-to-peer traffic
although the difference is subtle.

One interesting aspect of this article is that the measurements are
taken in Japan, which leads all other countries in Fiber-To-The-Home.
Although it may be the case then that their results do not apply here
in North America, they do in fact give some insights in terms of what
to expect in the coming years as broadband access improves and takes
over the residential Internet access market.

Through their extensive data collection and analysis the authors have
found some very interesting results:

- The peak hours have shifted from office hours to evening hours and a
large amount of traffic is constantly flowing.

- Between November 2004 and November 2005 broadband customer traffic
increased by 37%, a considerable amount for one year.

- The outbound traffic to customers is slightly larger than the
inbound which completely goes against conventional wisdom. It was
always believed that users downloaded significantly more than they
uploaded. In fact, ISPs are known to employ asymmetric line speeds to
users. This statistic, however, shows that there is a shift in
application usage in the Internet towards more symmetric activity.

- The probability of finding a so-called heavy-hitter in a given
population is constant across various regions. This indicates
universal access to services in Japan, a promising statistic.

- There were more heavy-hitters in the fiber subscribers compared to
DSL subscribers. This seems to indicate that the greater the download
bandwidth available to users, the more they will consume. Thus it
seems Internet congestion will always be an issue.

- In terms of application usage, some of the most popular file-sharing
P2P applications in Japan use arbitrary port numbers. If this trend
continues, it will become difficult for ISPs to differentiate packets
based on application, a practice they are said to currently employ.

- The authors found that Internet traffic has poor locality. Although
this is a negative aspect, it suggests that perhaps with more
intelligent P2P application development, the traffic generated by
these applications can be restricted to regions by locality
alleviating congestion conditions.

- High-volume traffic was not only generated by P2P file sharing
applications, but also by other applications like content-downloading
from a single server.

- There is a trend towards increasing heterogeneity in users in the
Internet. Fiber-To-The-Home will introduce a great divide. This may
begin to violate the fairness aspect of Internet routing if ISPs do
not throttle these high-bandwidth users.

- A new killer application has the potential to cause drastic changes
in Internet traffic.

- Empowered end-users with high bandwidth access are leading to a
tragedy of the commons type scenario. This may lead to a paradigm
shift in the Internet to potentially QOS, differentiated services or
even paying by use rather than access.

The measurements these authors undertook required great effort.
Traffic information is usually kept secret by ISPs for various
reasons. There is a significant amount of red tape which must be cut
to undertake such a project. Furthermore, a project of this scale
takes time and patience. By focusing on Japan, which seems to be
ahead in Internet access and Internet technology, we get a look into
the potential future of the Internet and the implications of
high-bandwidth fiber access into the home. Overall this was a very
high quality paper with interesting findings.

-- Nadeem
Received on Fri Nov 17 2006 - 18:54:14 EST