Wide-area Internet traffic patterns and characteristics

The Internet is rapidly growing in number of users, traffic levels, and topological complexity. At the same time it is increasingly driven by economic competition. These developments render the characterization of network usage and workloads more difficult, and yet more critical. Few recent studies have been published reporting Internet backbone traffic usage and characteristics. At MCI, we have implemented a high-performance, low-cost monitoring system that can capture traffic and perform analyses. We have deployed this monitoring tool on OC-3 trunks within the Internet MCI's backbone and also within the NSF-sponsored vBNS. This article presents observations on the patterns and characteristics of wide-area Internet traffic, as recorded by MCI's OC-3 traffic monitors. We report on measurements from two OC-3 trunks in MCI's commercial Internet backbone over two time ranges (24-hour and 7-day) in the presence of up to 240,000 flows. We reveal the characteristics of the traffic in terms of packet sizes, flow duration, volume, and percentage composition by protocol and application, as well as patterns seen over the two time scales     

Evaluating the impact of emerging streaming media applications onTCP/IP performance

Emerging streaming media applications in the Internet primarily use UDP transport. The difficulty with supporting this type of traffic on the Internet is that they not only generate large volumes of traffic, but they are also not as responsive to network congestion as TCP-based applications. As a result, streaming media UDP traffic can cause two major problems in the Internet: congestion collapse and unfair allocations of bandwidth among competing traffic flows. A solution to these problems is available in many Internet environments. The Internet backbone, various ISPs, and DSL access networks rely on ATM as their layer 2 transport technology, and in such environments, ATM's available bit rate service can efficiently address these problems. ABR is able to avoid congestion collapse and provide fair bandwidth allocations by distributing the unutilized bandwidth fairly among competing flows. This article presents simulation results and empirical measurements that illustrate the congestion collapse and unfairness problems, and ATM ABR's effectiveness in addressing those problems     

Network pricing: can both ISP and P2P benefit?

Internet service providers are facing increasing back pressure from rising access demand by users, especially peer‐to‐peer (P2P)‐based applications that greatly enhance the large‐scale distribution of content into and out of their networks. With the ever increasing consumption pressure on scarce bandwidth resources, ISPs have been forced to reconsider their business model of overselling ‘all‐you‐can‐eat’ broadband at flat rates. Technical solutions such as traffic differentiation or blocking violate the principle of network neutrality; traffic shaping and deep packet analysis fall short in the presence of encryption; and P4P (localized P2P)‐based solutions are difficult to achieve in a heterogeneous environment. Economically, various usage‐based pricing schemes have been proposed and discussed. While they can improve efficiency in bandwidth consumption, they tend to face strong customer resistance as users have strong preference in favour of simple flat rates. We argue that any feasible pricing reforms cannot deviate much from the current flat rates while providing financial incentives for bandwidth hogs to limit their bandwidth access. In contrast to normal usage‐based pricing models that charge by volume, we propose a temporal‐based pricing model that may generate a mutually beneficial solution that can not only increase the profitability of ISPs but also accommodate P2P, rather than killing it, without changing the software, protocols or hardware that clients or ISPs use on the network.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd     

一种基于Tracker端偏向邻居选择的距离感知BitTorrent系统

To address cross-ISP traffic problem caused by BitTorrent, we present our design and evaluation of a proximity-aware BitTorrent system. In our approach, clients generate global proximityaware information by using landmark clustering; the tracker uses this proximity to maintain all peers in an orderly way and hands back a biased subset consisting of the peers who are physically closest to the requestor. Our approach requires no co-operation between P2P users and their Internet infra structures, such as ISPs or CDNs, no constantly path monitoring or probing their neighbors. The simulation results show that our approach can not only reduce unnecessary cross- ISP traffic, but also allow downloadsing fast.     

Assessing the quality of voice communications over Internet backbones

As the Internet evolves into a ubiquitous communication infrastructure and provides various services including telephony, it will be expected to meet the quality standards achieved in the public switched telephone network. Our objective in this paper is to assess to what extent today's Internet meets this expectation. Our assessment is based on delay and loss measurements taken over wide-area backbone networks and uses subjective voice quality measures capturing the various impairments incurred. First, we compile the results of various studies into a single model for assessing the voice-over-IP (VoIP) quality. Then, we identify different types of typical Internet paths and study their VoIP performance. For each type of path, we identify those characteristics that affect the VoIP perceived quality. Such characteristics include the network loss and the delay variability that should be appropriately handled by the playout scheduling at the receiver. Our findings indicate that although voice services can be adequately provided by some ISPs, a significant number of Internet backbone paths lead to poor performance.     

ShareStorm:一种高效的P2P内容分发协议

提出一个称为ShareStorm的P2P内容分发协议。相比于BitTorrent,ShareStorm显著降低了内容被分发的时间,使最终用户具有更好的下载体验,同时显著提高了内容被分发的效率,大幅度降低ISP运营商的运营成本,且ShareStorm允许ISP运营商动态调整指定区域的流量。     

高效能接入网络助电信运营商从互联网价值链获益

面对成为互联网流量管道供应商的尴尬,运营商需要构建一张具有以下特征的高能效接入网：高带宽（每用户达到50M甚至更高）、低延时、成本最优化的全IP宽带接入;采用可以同时满足家庭宽带用户、商业用户和移动基站回程等应用的统一融合的接入网平台;具有用户/业务/应用智能感知功能来保障正确的流量处理。高效能接入网将帮助运营商成为急速增长的高附加值互联网内容产业链的一部分。     

互联网骨干网流量的建模和特征

With enormous growth of the number of Internet users and appearance of new applications, characterization of Internet traffic has attracted more and more attention and has become one of the major challenging issues in telecommunication network over the past few years. In this paper, we study the network traffic pattern of the aggregate traffic and of specific application traffic, especially the popular applications such as P2P, VoIP that contribute most network traffic. Our study verified that majority Internet backbone traffic is contributed by a small portion of users and a power function can be used to approximate the contribution of each user to the overall traffic. We show that P2P applications are the dominant traffic contributor in current Internet Backbone of China. In addition, we selectively present the traffic pattern of different applications in detail.     

Interprovider differentiated service interconnection management models in the Internet bandwidth commodity markets

Due to the recent evolution of telecommunications infrastructure and the Internet as a commodity market for bandwidth, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) encounter new issues concerned with bandwidth management for the network interconnection. Bandwidth commodity exchange is considered a new B2B (Business-to-Business) electronic commerce application that brings new market opportunities to carriers and service providers for managing their bandwidth resources. This paper develops market-based bandwidth management optimization models for Differentiated Service (DiffServ) QoS (Quality of Service) networks using an implementation of the bandwidth management agent, BMP (Bandwidth Management Point). We use network economic models to formulate an optimization problem for the interconnection and resource allocation policy of the DiffServ network. We formulate and develop those economic models as optimization problems of LP, NLP, MILP and mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), and discuss the pricing mechanisms and available solution approaches for the implementation of the BMP's resource optimization process. Different opportunity costs are estimated based on the results of a network simulation using traffic flow statistics measured from a recent Internet backbone. We then numerically simulate the behavior of backbone network ISPs to optimize their profits for various demand scenarios.     

IPTV over P2P streaming networks: the mesh-pull approach

IPTV, an emerging Internet application, would revolutionize the entertainment and media industries; however, IPTV also has the potential to overwhelm the Internet backbone and access networks with traffic. To date, IPTV over P2P streaming networks has advanced significantly using two different approaches: tree-push versus mesh-pull. In particular, the mesh-pull streaming approach has achieved a number of successful commercial deployments. In this article, we examine the current progress in the research and development of mesh-pull P2P streaming systems. We provide an overview of the general mesh-pull streaming architecture and review various challenges, design issues, and interesting research problems in this approach. We discuss the construction costs for providing an IPTV service with service guarantees. We outline a measurement technique for monitoring the video playback quality of mesh-pull streaming systems. We emphasize that the future P2P IPTV systems should be designed to meet the expectations of users for quality-of-experience. We also identify a few other important issues for IPTV over P2P streaming networks, including the traffic pressure on ISPs, various security concerns, and the necessity to re-examine the most appropriate P2P architecture. Insights obtained in this study will be valuable for the development and deployment of future P2P IPTV systems.     

An integrated simple approach for the analysis of Internet backbone networks

This paper presents an integrated and simple approach for the analysis of Internet backbone networks, emphasizing the need for a balance between the network resources utilization requirements of the Internet services providers (ISPs) and the services delay constraints of the Internet users (IUs). The integration of the approach is achieved by putting together the various issues associated with the target analysis, including network topology, capacity, traffic load, routing, traffic flow, and performance; and by considering the analysis both at the link level and at the path level. The simplicity of the approach is achieved by eliminating unnecessary details; and by allowing the approach to be applied in easy steps, using an open source, straightforward computer program. A typical example is used to illustrate the practical application of the approach. The work would be useful to the designers and administrators of ISP networks facing the continuous challenge of newer e‐services and higher user traffic. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

P2P业务流量特性及其对Web业务的影响

近年来各种P2P应用不断出现及演进,P2P应用正逐渐成为下一代互联网的杀手级应用。但同时P2P消耗了Internet的大部分带宽,造成了网络技术服务商(ISP)接入网络的拥塞,从而使传统Internet应用性能受到严重影响。从P2P流数量、服务器负载、网络瓶颈点分布、往返时间(RTT)的异构特性等方面可以看出,P2P流量消耗了巨大的网络带宽,影响了传统Internet业务的性能,增加了运营成本。利用P2P流量和Web流量的集成模型,可以量化分析P2P流对Web流的影响,使网络运营商可以在网络瓶颈点对P2P连接数进行优化和调整,从而有效地控制P2P流量。NS2仿真结果较好地验证了该模型的有效性。     

Analysis and modeling of Internet backbone traffic with 5G/B5G

The effects that the 5th generation mobile network (5G) bring to Internet backbone were investigated qualitatively and quantitatively.First,the challenges that the characteristics of 5G,i.e.ultra-high data rate,ultra-low latency,and ultra-large number of connections,introduce to Internet backbone in terms of traffic,latency,and security were analyzed.Second,a model was proposed to capture the characteristics of 5G users and Internet traffic with the coordination of 5G,edge computing,and cloud computing.Then,numerical simulations were used to evaluate the model.The QoS requirements that Internet backbone faces under different extent of 5G deployment were evaluated.According to the study,increment of backbone traffic,increment of the ratio of propagation delay,and movement of bandwidth bottleneck are predicted after 5G/B5G deployment.     

Analysis of network function sharing in Content Delivery Network-as-a-service slicing scenarios

Video content consumption is currently dominating the mix of traffic observed in Internet service provider (ISP) networks. The distribution of that content is usually performed by means of content delivery network (CDN) caches storing and delivering multimedia. The advent of virtualization is calling attention to the CDN providers as a use case for virtualizing the cache function. In parallel, there is a trend for sharing network infrastructures as a way of reducing deployment costs by ISPs. Then, an interesting scenario emerges when considering the possibility of sharing virtualized cache functions among ISPs which are sharing a common physical infrastructure, mostly considering that those ISPs offer similar video content catalogs to end users. Furthermore, when deciding to share the caches among ISPs, it is interesting to understand the impacts due to limiting the storage capacity at the edge sites. This paper investigates through simulations the potential efficiencies that can be achieved when sharing a virtual cache function if compared with the classical approach of independent virtual caches operated per ISP, as well as the implications of limiting the storage capacity of the caches at the edge.     

建立互联网经济的生态环境

IP电器终端的发展、最终用户服务分离技术、城域网干网的建设和改造、内容供应商的商业模式以及互联网供应商的营运模式这5个互联网经济中的环节都代表着无比巨大的商业机遇。如何变商业机遇为经济现实的挑战在于能否将这五个环节有机地结合并运作起来，形成性的互联网生态系统，从而造就一个双赢互利商业环境。     

ISP Traffic Management: Will Innovation or Regulation Ensure Fairness?

Telecommunications regulatory agencies in the US and Canada, responding to complaints, are looking at how far Internet service providers (ISPs) can go in limiting customers' bandwidth and how much information they must disclose about how they're doing it. Concurrently, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards body has recently convened two Birds of a Feather (BoF) groups to address traffic-management complexities exemplified by rising peer-to-peer (P2P ) application use that some ISPs claim is choking off bandwidth for other users.     

P2P network traffic control mechanism based on global evaluation values

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing technology has been widely used on the Internet to exchange data. However, it occupies much network bandwidth, and thus greatly influences traditional business on the Interact. Besides, problems about free-riders and 'tragedy of the commons' in the P2P environment estrange from it P2P users who constantly contribute to the network with quality resources. This article proposes a new P2P network traffic control mechanism based on global evaluation values. It aims to help individual users to avoid peak traffic time as much as possible, ease network congestion and protect traditional business on the Interact, as well as differentiating priority grades of peers according to their contributions and stimulating them to share their valuable resources actively. This article first analyzes the current state of network traffic, and then elaborates on P2P network traffic control policies and proposes the peer's priority level differentiation mechanism based on global evaluation values. Finally,after the testing results and analysis of the proposed P2P network traffic control mechanism are discussed, conclusions are drawn.     

Packet-level traffic measurements from the Sprint IP backbone

Network traffic measurements provide essential data for networking research and network management. In this article we describe a passive monitoring system designed to capture GPS synchronized packet-level traffic measurements on OC-3, OC-12, and OC-48 links. Our system is deployed in four POP in the Sprint IP backbone. Measurement data is stored on a 10 Tbyte storage area network and analyzed on a computing cluster. We present a set of results to both demonstrate the strength of the system and identify recent changes in Internet traffic characteristics. The results include traffic workload, analyses of TCP flow round-trip times, out-of-sequence packet rates, and packet delay. We also show that some links no longer carry Web traffic as their dominant component to the benefit of file sharing and media streaming. On most links we monitored, TCP flows exhibit low out-of-sequence packet rates, and backbone delays are dominated by the speed of light.     

Secure and Policy-Compliant Source Routing

In today's Internet, inter-domain route control remains elusive; nevertheless, such control could improve the performance, reliability, and utility of the network for end users and ISPs alike. While researchers have proposed a number of source routing techniques to combat this limitation, there has thus far been no way for independent ASes to ensure that such traffic does not circumvent local traffic policies, nor to accurately determine the correct party to charge for forwarding the traffic. We present Platypus, an authenticated source routing system built around the concept of network capabilities, which allow for accountable, fine-grained path selection by cryptographically attesting to policy compliance at each hop along a source route. Capabilities can be composed to construct routes through multiple ASes and can be delegated to third parties. Platypus caters to the needs of both end users and ISPs: users gain the ability to pool their resources and select routes other than the default, while ISPs maintain control over where, when, and whose packets traverse their networks. We describe the design and implementation of an extensive Platypus policy framework that can be used to address several issues in wide-area routing at both the edge and the core, and evaluate its performance and security. Our results show that incremental deployment of Platypus can achieve immediate gains.