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

        This paper investigates the effect that peer-to-peer traffic has on
the Internet backbone. In particular, the authors study the traffic
growth in Japanese backbones, and examine the effects that fiber based
broadband access has versus regular DSL access.

        The importance of this study arises from the observation that as
low-cost high bandwidth access to the Internet is provided by way of
Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) broadband access, new applications are
emerging to take advantage of this fact. This affects the amount of
traffic being generated from residential users, and has a significant
impact on the Internet backbone, which needs to be quantified.

        One of the problems that the authors encountered in gathering data for
this study is that ISPs tend to collect data that contains sensitive
information, and hence are not willing to share it. To find a practical
solution to this problem and obtain macro-level data describing the
impact of residential traffic on ISP backbones, the authors formed a
study group that consisted of members from several major Japanese ISPs.

         The authors collected two different types of data sets. The first was
obtained by aggregating interface counters of edge routers from seven
ISPs, while the second was collected using Sampled NetFlow from one
ISP.

        The main results of the paper are as follows: residential broadband
traffic is responsible for two thirds of ISP backbone traffic and is
increasing at 37% per year; a small segment of users dictates overall
behaviour in traffic patterns; and a very small percentage of
heavy-hitters accounts for the majority of inbound volume into an ISP.

        This was a good paper. Its findings provide insight into the fact that
ISPs will need to restructure their pricing and cost schemes as
peer-to-peer traffic becomes more prevalent. Furthermore, the paper
suggests a fruitful line of future research that involves collecting
data from non-Japanese ISPs to see how it compares to the data in this
study.
Received on Tue Nov 21 2006 - 00:10:32 EST