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

This paper focuses on studying the growth of internet backbone traffic in
Japan during the last five years and the role user-to-user traffic has
played in this growth. The data for this study was collected by forming a
study group with seven ISPs participating in the study and each providing
coarse grained logs. These individual logs were used to build an
aggregated traffic for analysis. Two different kind of analyses were
carried out, one focusing on growth of aggregate traffic using the
aggregate logs and the second focusing on traffic generated by individual
users using the sampled data obtained from one of the participating ISPs.

Analysis of aggregated customer traffic show that the growth rate of
residential broadband customer traffic between November 2004 and November
2005 was 26% for inbound and 46% for outbound with a combined volume of
37%. Such an increase has caused tremendous increase in internet backbone
traffic because of heavy usage of peer-to-peer file systems. This has
serious implications for ISPs because as the number of broadband users are
increasing it is highly likely that they will use these peer-to-peer
sharing system to utilize the available bandwidth which could cause
bottleneck on ISP backbone if preventive steps are not taken to cater for
this change in internet traffic. Also the analysis show the ratio of
international traffic to total external traffic is significantly low
meaning that the Japanese users rarely download contents from overseas
resources.

In the second sections the author has analyzed the individual users and
the traffic generated by these individual users. Analysis show that a
small number of heavy hitters dominate the total traffic and the
distribution of heavy hitters is similar across different regions. Though
there is no obvious difference between behavior of fiber users and DSL
users but still fiber traffic accounts for 86% of total inbound volume and
80% of total residential volume and this might be due to different number
of heavy hitters in different groups. The author has also analyzed the
port numbers used in the traffic and as expected the TCP ports dominate
with 83% share with port 80 accounting for 9%. Dominance of TCP ports is
due to the fact the peer-to-peer systems uses TCP ports to communicate and
peer-to-peer traffic dominates the backbone traffic.

This paper shows extensive analysis of backbone traffic that makes it
clear that the internet traffic pattern is changing and it is highly
unpredictable as any new application could change the network usage of
broadband users. Also though it is fascinating that end users are getting
a high bandwidth but this could cause bottleneck at backbones with the
increasing popularity of different contents delivery networks such as
bit-torrent and availability of rich media contents.
Received on Tue Nov 21 2006 - 02:23:10 EST