Review - The Impact and Implications of the Growth in Residential

Review of The Impact and Implications of the Growth in Residential
User-to-User Traffic
by Ivan Hernández

The paper analyzes aggregated traffic measurements of several Japanese
ISP that cover the 42% of that country's backbone traffic. This paper
is particularly interesting because of the characteristics in
broadband access in Japan. Japan is one of the countries that is
narrowing the gap in the last mile by providing to their users fiber
access at home to get up to 100Mbps. This huge increment in the
bandwidth provided to users has impacts in the backbone of the ISP,
this study tries to discover them.

First, this paper is of great value, because it is a precedent of the
cooperation between ISPs with the research community. We can learn at
least four things of this paper (1) Provided the tools to the ISP to
get the required data, (2) To get the data with just the exact amount
of granularity to be able to do the desired analysis without get
information from the internal structure of the ISP's network, (3) To
guarantee the confidentiality of the disclosure data provided by ISPs,
and (4) Work in problems that really have an impact on the industry,
i.e., the ISP release the information because they are interested in
the results of the analysis. All of these allow the authors to get
amount of valuable data.

The analysis shows interesting results. First, the amounts of traffic
that generate users and the increment rate is impressive, see Figure 4.
The residential broadband traffic in November 2005 is estimated to be
353Gbps for inbound and 468Gbps for outbound. It looks like the
downlink is not anymore the more utilized by Japanese users, the
authors suspect that this is caused by peer-to-peer applications. In
addition, there is an increment of traffic from 21:00 to 23:00 -- we
could associate this nightly residential pattern with the increment at
nights in P2P traffic from [1], of course if we assume that traffic in
USA is similar to Japan --. Another impressive figure is the one
related to the amount of traffic that are able to download Japanese
people from home in a day 2.5GB (or more)! Another result shows that
related to heavy hitters shows that 4% of users use 75% of the total
inbound traffic and 60% of the outbound traffic, i.e., a small group
of heavy hitters represent a significant part of the total traffic --
similar results that the one showed in [1] --. Next, the authors show
the most prevalent protocols in the traffic, not surprisingly web is
one of the more prevalents (9%), but not anymore the most prevalent;
the 83.44% of the ports are larger than 1024, and the authors suspect
that these ports are used by a popular Japanese peer-to-peer
system. Finally, I found interesting the results related to locality,
about 90% is domestic communication where both ends are domestic! The
authors explanations are cogent.

[1] Stefan Saroiu, Krishna P. Gummadi, Richard J. Dunn, Steven
D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy, An Analysis of Internet Content
Delivery Systems
Received on Mon Nov 20 2006 - 22:13:56 EST