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

Motivation: High penetration of fiber-based broadband access in Japan has
resulted in the growth of residential user-to-user traffic. Its unique
because Japan is one of the very few countries where fiber based broadband
has penetrated highly and this study has been able to study residential
traffic with the cooperation of major ISPs in Japan.

Key Points:

1) Doing such measurement studies involves political and administrative
hurdles in order to be able to gather the trace. Overcoming these hurdles is
a major challenge.

2) The traffic is growing at a rapid pace with the increased penetration of
fiber based broadband internet at the residential places.

3) The outbound traffic is again seen to be higher than outbound. This is
due to the P2P traffic that is increasingly using the upload bandwidth of
the users.

Many interesting observations are made about the network in Japan, which
might be considered to be representative of the next generation broadband
access patterns:

4) The probability of finding a heavy-hitter in a given population is
constant and the distribution of aggregated traffic volume directly depends
on the population which is due to the availability of fairly universal
access services in Japan. With fiber coming into picture, people are
shifting to downloading as much as 2.5GB per day This results in the
observation that about 4% of the users account for 75% of total inbound
traffic and 60% of the outbound.

5) Fiber users have higher heavy-hitter population and thus slight
differences in the density is seen while studying distribution of heavy
hitters as well as trying to correlate inbound and outbound traffic per
user.

6) Internet communication patterns show poor locality properties as opposed
to telephone networks. Moreover, high-volume traffic is not just due to P2P
downloading but also content downloading from a single server. This models
the race between YouTube serving model and BitTorrent serving model.

7) It was interesting to note the cultural impact on internet bandwidth
usage patterns where language had isolated the community at large resulting
in fairly closed domestic traffic. A social impact is the rising popularity
of youTube and similar sites. A political impact to the usage pattern can be
seen when routing happens through specific countries instead of the optimal
ones. The economic impact is clear from the penetration of fiber based
broadband access in Japan where some countries are still lingering with
Dialups.

The extensive growth of power users using a lot of bandwidth now requires
the need for reevaluating cost/pricing by the ISPs and development of CDN to
accommodate for the changing scenario. Else, the internet backbone in its
current form would be inefficient and even incapable of supporting the
growing needs and numbers of users.
Received on Tue Nov 21 2006 - 04:35:00 EST