Inter-AS Traffic Patterns and Their Implications

This paper reports on a study of traffic patterns among Autonomous Systems (ASes), based on traces taken at various points in the Internet. The traces display a highly nonuniform distribution of traffic on flows between pairs of hosts, networks, and ASes. Aggregation along coarser granularities, such as networks or ASes, accentuates this nonuniform distribution. In one typical trace, for example, the top 9% of flows between ASes accounts for 86.7% of the packets and 90.7% of the bytes transmitted. A highly nonuniform traffic pattern suggests that routers need to maintain only limited QoS flow state. The paper discusses the implications of this phenomenon on different proposed QoS mechanisms.