Analysis of Interdomain Traffic

This report presents the results from measurements of interdomain traffic traces. It discusses the implications of interdomain traffic characterization on the feasibility of interdomain traffic engineering. In the first part, we study the relationship between interdomain traffic and the routing view of the Internet. Our contributions are the following. The distribution of the traffic received by the studied ISPs is uneven with respect to the “distance” from which the traffic is generated by the interdomain sources. There is some consistency between the actual distribution of the received traffic and the distribution of the number of interdomain traffic sources seen from the interdomain routing tables. Most of the traffic volume received by our studied ISPs comes from a limited distance compared to the size of the Internet. An important percentage of the traffic received by our ISPs comes from a limited number of interdomain traffic sources. In addition, we provide indications about the day-to-day stability of the interdomain traffic for the most important traffic sources. We also analyze the variability of the interdomain traffic and show that it is possible to reduce this variability. This first part hence shows the usefulness of interdomain traffic engineering. After that, we study the dynamics of the interdomain traffic on more formal grounds. We try to inderstand its important variability and point out the factors that are the most likely to be responsible for this variability. This formal study of the variability of the interdomain traffic provides the means for evaluating the issue of predicting the bandwidth required by interdomain flows.