Abstract
Geographically broad, application-aware studies of large subscriber networks are rarely undertaken because of the challenges of accessing secured network premises, protecting subscriber privacy, and deploying scalable measurement devices. We present a study examining bandwidth consumption and the rate at which new flows are created in 45 cable, DSL, cellular and WiFi subscriber networks across 26 countries on six continents. Using deep packet inspection, we find that one or two applications can strongly influence the magnitude and duration of daily bandwidth peaks. We analyze bandwidth over 7 days to better understand the potential for network optimization using virtual network functions. We find that on average cellular and non-cellular networks operate at 61% and 57% of peak bandwidth respectively. Since most networks are over provisioned, there is considerable room for optimization.
Our study of flow creation reveals that DNS is the top producer of new flows in 22 of the 45 networks (accounting for 20–61% of new flows in those networks). We find that peak flow rates (measured in thousands of flows per Gigabit) can vary by several orders of magnitude across applications. Networks whose application mix includes large proportions of DNS, PeerToPeer, and social networking traffic can expect to experience higher overall peak flow rates. Conversely, networks which are dominated by video can expect lower peak flow rates. We believe that these findings will prove valuable in understanding how traffic characteristics can impact the design, evaluation, and deployment of modern networking devices, including virtual network functions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Akamai Technologies Inc., Akamai’s State of the Internet, vol. 7, no. 4, Q4 (2014)
Barford, P., Kline, J., Plonka, D., Ron, A.: A signal analysis of network traffic anomalies. In: 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurement (2002)
Bolla, R., Bruschi, R., Carrega, A., Davoli, F., Suino, D., Vassilakis, C., Zafeiropoulos, A.: Cutting the energy bills of internet service providers and telecoms through power management: an impact analysis. Comput. Netw. 56(10), 2320–2342 (2012)
Bolla, R., Bruschi, R., Lombardo, C., Mangialardi, S.: Dropv2: energy efficiency through network function virtualization. IEEE Netw. 28(2), 26–32 (2014)
Bolla, R., Bruschi, R., Lombardo, C., Suino, D.: Evaluating the energy-awareness of future Internet devices. In: IEEE Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing, July 2011
Butkiewicz, M., Madhyastha, H.V., Sekar, V.: Understanding website complexity: measurements, metrics, and implications. In: ACM IMC (2011)
Carela-Español, V., Barlet-Ros, P., Bifet, A., Fukuda, K.: A streaming flow-based technique for traffic classification applied to 12 + 1 years of Internet traffic. Telecommun. Syst. 63(2), 191–204 (2016)
Castro, S., Zhang, M., John, W., Wessels, D., Claffy, K.: Understanding and preparing for DNS evolution. In: Ricciato, F., Mellia, M., Biersack, E. (eds.) TMA 2010. LNCS, vol. 6003, pp. 1–16. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-12365-8_1
Christensen, K., Reviriego, P., Nordman, B., Bennett, M., Mostowfi, M., Maestro, J.A.: IEEE 802.3 az: the road to energy efficient ethernet. IEEE Commun. Mag. 48(11), 50–56 (2010)
Cisco Systems Inc. The Zettabyte Era: Trends and Analysis, May 2015
Curtis, A.R., Mogul, J.C., Tourrilhes, J., Yalagandula, P., Sharma, P., Banerjee, S.: Devoflow: scaling flow management for high-performance networks. In: ACM SIGCOMM (2011)
Estan, C., Keys, K., Moore, D., Varghese, G.: Building a better NetFlow. In: ACM SIGCOMM (2004)
Fomenkov, M., Keys, K., Moore, D., Claffy, K.: Longitudinal study of internet traffic in 1998–2003. In: Winter International Symposium on Information and Communication Technologies (2004)
Fraleigh, C., Moon, S., Lyles, B., Cotton, C., Khan, M., Moll, D., Rockell, R., Seely, T., Diot, C.: Packet-level traffic measurements from the sprint IP backbone. IEEE Netw. Mag. 17(6), 6–16 (2003)
Fukuda, K., Asai, H., Nagami, K.: Tracking the evolution and diversity in network usage of smartphones. In: ACM IMC (2015)
Han, B., Gopalakrishnan, V., Ji, L., Lee, S.: Network function virtualization: challenges and opportunities for innovations. IEEE Commun. Mag. 53(2), 90–97 (2015)
Kaminsky, D.: Black ops 2008: It’s the end of the cache as we know it (2008). http://www.slideshare.net/dakami/dmk-bo2-k8
Krishnan, S., Monrose, F.: DNS prefetching and its privacy implications: when good things go bad. In: USENIX Conference on Large-scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (2010)
Labovitz, C., Iekel-Johnson, S., McPherson, D., Oberheide, J., Jahanian, F.: Internet inter-domain traffic. In: ACM SIGCOMM (2010)
Mai, J., Chuah, C.-N., Sridharan, A., Ye, T., Zang, H.: Is sampled data sufficient for anomaly detection? In: ACM IMC (2006)
Maier, G., Feldmann, A., Paxson, V., Allman, M.: On dominant characteristics of residential broadband internet traffic. In: ACM IMC (2009)
Moore, D., Shannon, C., Brown, D.J., Voelker, G.M., Savage, S.: Inferring internet denial-of-service activity. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 24(2), 115–139 (2006)
Nedevschi, S., Popa, L., Iannaccone, G., Ratnasamy, S., Wetherall, D.: Reducing network energy consumption via sleeping and rate-adaptation. In: NSDI (2008)
Richter, P., Chatzis, N., Smaragdakis, G., Feldmann, A., Willinger, W.: Distilling the internet’s application mix from packet-sampled traffic. In: Mirkovic, J., Liu, Y. (eds.) PAM 2015. LNCS, vol. 8995, pp. 179–192. Springer, Cham (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_14
Rotem, E., Naveh, A., Ananthakrishnan, A., Rajwan, D., Weissmann, E.: Power-management architecture of the Intel microarchitecture code-named Sandy Bridge. IEEE Micro 2(2), 20–27 (2012)
Sandvine Inc., Global Internet Phenomena, December 2015. https://www.sandvine.com/trends/global-internet-phenomena/
Thompson, K., Miller, G., Wilder, R.: Wide-area Internet traffic patterns and characteristics. IEEE Netw. 11(6), 10–23 (1997)
Acknowledgments
Tim Brecht’s work was partially supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant. Thanks to Dan Deeth, Ian Wormsbecker, and Sau Cheng Lim at Sandvine for their assistance in gathering data, understanding network deployments, and for feedback on several drafts of this paper. We also thank Bernard Wong and S. Keshav from the University of Waterloo for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pariag, D., Brecht, T. (2017). Application Bandwidth and Flow Rates from 3 Trillion Flows Across 45 Carrier Networks. In: Kaafar, M., Uhlig, S., Amann, J. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10176. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54328-4_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54328-4_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54327-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54328-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)