Characterization of ISP Traffic: Trends, User Habits, and Access Technology Impact

In the recent years, the research community has increased its focus on network monitoring which is seen as a key tool to understand the Internet and the Internet users. Several studies have presented a deep characterization of a particular application, or a particular network, considering the point...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE eTransactions on network and service management 2012-06, Vol.9 (2), p.142-155
Main Authors: Garcia-Dorado, J. L., Finamore, A., Mellia, M., Meo, M., Munafo, M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Availability
Bit rate
Habits
Heterogeneity
Internet
ISP traffic
Monitoring
Network monitoring
Networks
Optical fiber subscriber loops
Probes
Streaming media
traffic analyzer
Traffic engineering
Traffic flow
Trends
World Wide Web
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Summary:In the recent years, the research community has increased its focus on network monitoring which is seen as a key tool to understand the Internet and the Internet users. Several studies have presented a deep characterization of a particular application, or a particular network, considering the point of view of either the ISP, or the Internet user. In this paper, we take a different perspective. We focus on three European countries where we have been collecting traffic for more than a year and a half through 5 vantage points with different access technologies. This humongous amount of information allows us not only to provide precise, multiple, and quantitative measurements of "What the user do with the Internet" in each country but also to identify common/uncommon patterns and habits across different countries and nations. Considering different time scales, we start presenting the trend of application popularity; then we focus our attention to a one-month long period, and further drill into a typical daily characterization of users activity. Results depict an evolving scenario due to the consolidation of new services as Video Streaming and File Hosting and to the adoption of new P2P technologies. Despite the heterogeneity of the users, some common tendencies emerge that can be leveraged by the ISPs to improve their service.
ISSN:1932-4537
1932-4537
DOI:10.1109/TNSM.2012.022412.110184