Observing slow crustal movement in residential user traffic

ABSTRACT

It is often argued that rapidly increasing video content along with the penetration of high-speed access is leading to explosive growth in the Internet traffic. Contrary to this popular claim, technically solid reports show only modest traffic growth worldwide. This paper sheds light on the causes of the apparently slow growth trends by analyzing commercial residential traffic in Japan where the fiber access rate is much higher than other countries. We first report that Japanese residential traffic also has modest growth rates using aggregated measurements from six ISPs. Then, we investigate residential per-customer traffic in one ISP by comparing traffic in 2005 and 2008, before and after the advent of YouTube and other similar services. Although at first glance a small segment of peer-to-peer users still dictate the overall volume, they are slightly decreasing in population and volume share. Meanwhile, the rest of the users are steadily moving towards rich media content with increased diversity. Surely, a huge amount of online data and abundant headroom in access capacity can conceivably lead to a massive traffic growth at some point in the future. The observed trends, however, suggest that video content is unlikely to disastrously overflow the Internet, at least not anytime soon.

REFERENCES

• 1: Naimul Basher , Aniket Mahanti , Anirban Mahanti , Carey Williamson , Martin Arlitt, A comparative analysis of web and peer-to-peer traffic, Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, April 21-25, 2008, Beijing, China [doi>10.1145/1367497.1367537]
• 2: N. Brownlee and kc claffy. Understanding internet traffic streams: Dragonflies and tortoises. IEEE Communications Magazine, 40: 110--117, 2002.
• 3: Kenjiro Cho , Kensuke Fukuda , Hiroshi Esaki , Akira Kato, The impact and implications of the growth in residential user-to-user traffic, Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, September 11-15, 2006, Pisa, Italy
• 4: Cisco Sampled NetFlow. http://www.cisco.com/go/netflow.
• 5: Cisco. Approaching the Zettabyte Era, white paper, June 2008.
• 6: Cisco. Cisco Visual Networking Index --- Forecast and Methodology, 2007--2012, white paper, June 2008.
• 7: FTTH Council Europe. True broadband in Europe, Mar. 2008.
• 8: K. Fukuda. Towards modeling of traffic demand of node in large-scale network. In IEEE ICC2008, pages 214--218, Beijing, China, May 2008.
• 9: R. Gibrat. Les inégalitś économiques. Paris, Sirey, 1931.
• 10: Phillipa Gill , Martin Arlitt , Zongpeng Li , Anirban Mahanti, Youtube traffic characterization: a view from the edge, Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, October 24-26, 2007, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1298306.1298310]
• 11: Krishna P. Gummadi , Richard J. Dunn , Stefan Saroiu , Steven D. Gribble , Henry M. Levy , John Zahorjan, Measurement, modeling, and analysis of a peer-to-peer file-sharing workload, Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 19-22, 2003, Bolton Landing, NY, USA
• 12: Lei Guo , Songqing Chen , Zhen Xiao , Enhua Tan , Xiaoning Ding , Xiaodong Zhang, Measurements, analysis, and modeling of BitTorrent-like systems, Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement, p.4-4, October 19-21, 2005, Berkeley, CA
• 13: B. A. Huberman and L. A. Adamic. Growth dynamics of the world-wide web. Nature, 401: 131, 1999.
• 14: W. John, S. Tafvelin, and T. Olovsson. Trends and differences in connection-behavior within classes of internet backbone traffic. In PAM2008 (LNCS 4979), pages 192--201, Cleveland, OH, Apr. 2008.
• 15: Japan Internet Exchange Co., Ltd. http://www.jpix.co.jp/.
• 16: Multifeed JPNAP service. http://www.jpnap.net/.
• 17: Mingzhe Li , Mark Claypool , Robert Kinicki , James Nichols, Characteristics of streaming media stored on the Web, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), v.5 n.4, p.601-626, November 2005 [doi>10.1145/1111627.1111629]
• 18: NSPIXP. http://nspixp.wide.ad.jp/.
• 19: A. M. Odlyzko. Minnesota Internet traffic studies. http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.html.
• 20: OECD Broadband Statistics. http://oecd.org/sti/ict/broadband, Dec. 2007.
• 21: T. Oetiker. RRDtool: Round Robin Database Tool. http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/.
• 22: Tobias Oetiker, MRTG: The Multi Router Traffic Grapher, Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Systems Administration, p.141-148, December 06-11, 1998
• 23: L. Plissonneau, J.-L. Costeux, and P. Brown. Analysis of peer-to-peer traffic on ADSL. In PAM2005 (LNCS3431), pages 69--82, Boston, MA, Mar. 2005.
• 24: S. Saroiu, P. K. Gummadi, and S. D. Gribble. A measurement study of peer-to-peer file sharing systems. In MMCN'02, pages 156--170, San Jose, CA, Jan. 2002.
• 25: Shriram Sarvotham , Rudolf Riedi , Richard Baraniuk, Connection-level analysis and modeling of network traffic, Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurement, November 01-02, 2001, San Francisco, California, USA [doi>10.1145/505202.505215]
• 26: Subhabrata Sen , Jia Wang, Analyzing peer-to-peer traffic across large networks, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment, November 06-08, 2002, Marseille, France [doi>10.1145/637201.637222]
• 27: M. Siekkinen, D. Collange, G. Urvoy-Keller, and E. W. Biersack. Performance limitations of adsl users: A case study. In PAM2007 (LNCS 4427), pages 145--154, Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium, Apr. 2007.
• 28: TeleGeography Research. Globel Internet Geography., 2007.
• 29: The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan. MIC Statistics on data communications. http://www.soumu.go.jp/joho_tsusin/eng/statistics.html.
• 30: Haiyong Xie , Y. Richard Yang , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Yanbin Grace Liu , Abraham Silberschatz, P4p: provider portal for applications, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 conference on Data communication, August 17-22, 2008, Seattle, WA, USA
• 31: YouTube, LLC. http://www.youtube.com/.
• 32: Yin Zhang , Lee Breslau , Vern Paxson , Scott Shenker, On the characteristics and origins of internet flow rates, Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 19-23, 2002, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.3 Network Operations
          Subjects: Network monitoring

General Terms:
Management, Measurement

Keywords:
ISP traffic, residential broadband, traffic growth