Trends in Wide Area IP Traffic Patterns

We report results from a longitudinal analysis of the IP traffic workload seen at a single measurement site inside a major Internet traffic exchange point. Using data collected by the NLANR/MOAT Network Analysis Infrastructure (NAI) project [NAI] and analysis software from CAIDA’s CoralReef project [CoralReef], we present trends in application usage seen at the NASA Ames Internet Exchange over 10 months, from May 1999 through March 2000. We show changes in the fraction of traffic from streaming media and online gaming, as well as an increase in traffic from new applications such as Napster and IPSEC tunneling. We also show that our data does not indicate any overall change in the TCP/UDP traffic ratio at the Ames Internet Exchange during this period, or significant differences from the analyses by MCI Worldcom and CAIDA in 1998.