Measurements of Wide Area Internet Traffic

Measurement and analysis of current behavior are valuable techniques for the study of computer networks. In addition to providing insight into the operation and usage patterns of present networks, the results can be used to create realistic models of existing traffic sources. Such models are a key component of the analytic and simulation studies often undertaken in the design of future networks. This paper presents measurements of wide area Internet traffic gathered at the junction between a large industrial research laboratory and the rest of the Internet. Using bar graphs and histograms, it shows the statistics obtained for packet counts, byte counts, and packet length frequencies, broken down by major transport protocols and network services. For the purpose of modeling wide area traffic, the histograms are of particular interest because they concisely characterize the distribution of packet lengths produced by different wide area network services such as file transfer, remote login, and electronic mail. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh This work was performed while the author was at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was supported in part by AT&T Bell Laboratories and by the University of California with a MICRO program grant.