Tutorial: Insight Into Current Internet Traffic Workloads

Please note: answers are based on variety of collected data, from as far back as august 1995, as recently as 25 jun 97, and also based on our experience with traffic traces at other internet points over the last several years.

Questions:

  1. How can statistics of daily fluctations in traffic be useful to you?
  2. What comprises the largest component of internet traffic volume?
  3. Why is real-time traffic ominous?
  4. What threatens the internet's survivability most?
  5. What can help?
  6. Are non-U.S. sites using U.S. network infrastruture? Who cares?
  7. How does the number of traffic flows/conversations change as a function of flow granularity?
  8. Is traffic getting more `wide area'? Is wide area traffic getting wider?
  9. What about packet sizes? are we getting any more efficient payloads?
  10. What about mice (40 byte packets/flows)? Are they reproducing?
  11. What's the average wingspan of a packet?
  12. How unstable is Internet routing?
  13. What's worse than a virus on a network?
  14. What's intra-flow burstiness like?
  15. How much traffic goes to/from Class A, B, C addresses?
  16. Flow? huh? (geekier than others)
  17. How long are the mice troops?
  18. What's the average ASpath length?
  19. What about IPv6?

1. How can statistics of daily fluctations in traffic be useful to you?
or should you eat dinner and then netsurf or vice-versa?
(When is web traffic the worst?)

2. What comprises the largest component of internet traffic volume?
or which protocol (mail, ftp, news, web) accounts for the greatest number of packets/bytes/conversations?
 (What's the most popular application?)
3. Why is real-time multimedia traffic ominous?
or why was EUnet worried enough about cuseeme traffic to consider disable forwarding of it? Profiles of other applications on the net?
(How are audio/video traffic profiles different from other net applications?)
4. What threatens the internet's survivability most?
or which is harder on Internet infrastructure, www growth or audio/video applications?
(What will kill the Internet first, web or video?)
5. What can help?
or what research and development is currently focused on maintaining Internet robustness in the face of its incessant growth?
 (Show me hope --)
6. Are non-u.s. sites using u.s. network infrastruture? Who cares?
or is traffic from non-U.S. sites traversing Internet infrastructure as a transit hub/backbone?
(Does the U.S. export anything anymore?)
7. How does the number of individual traffic flows/conversations change as a function of flow granularity?
are there n^2 times as many host pair flows as their are destination network flows?
 (How much memory will a router need to support finer grained routing policies?)
8. Is traffic getting more `wide area'? Is wide area traffic getting wider?
How many AS'es does the `average' Internet packet travel? How many hops? Are the paths getting longer? Shorter? By hops or by miles of fiber or by miles of land?
(How wide area is the Internet?)
9. What about packet sizes?
(Are we getting any more efficient?)
10. What about mice? (40 byte packets/flows)
(Are they reproducing?)
11. What's the average number of hops a packet travels?
(What's the average `wingspan' of a packet?)
12. How unstable is Internet routing?
(How often will your packets change the path they take to the same destination?)
13. What's worse than a networked virus?
(Hint: multicast)
14. What's intra-flow burstiness like?
( How long between packets for a given flow? ) How many of those are arriving back-to-back, especially tiny ones, which make the router's life miserable?
15. How much traffic goes to/from address from different classes (or in a post-CIDR world, different prefix lengths) (How is traffic distributed among addresses of given sizes?)
16. Flow? huh?
(What do you mean by that? is that SYN/FIN-delimited or something else? )
17. How long are the mice troops?
(How long are the chains of small packets?)
18. What's the average ASpath length?
(How many ASes are in the average AS path, by number of paths and by quantity of traffic travelling across them?)
19. When will IPv6 happen?
last updated 25 dec 1997
questions/comments: info@nlanr.net.