A traffic analysis in the TRAMMS project

Internet usage is evolving, from the traditional WWW usage (i.e. downloading web pages), to triple-play usage where households may have all their communication services (telephony, data, TV) through their broadband access connection. The challenge is to design IP access networks so that they can deliver services with strict QoS demands such as IPTV while the same time having capacity for (from the operator's perspective) unwanted traffic, for example file sharing, demanded by the users.

One important part in meeting this research challenge is to identify and monitor Internet usage. Traffic modelling is tightly coupled both to traffic measurements and to engineering and techno economics. The focus of the measurements in this paper lies on analyzing parameters of interest for network management decisions, i.e. traffic volume, application usage, locality of content and popularity of content. For locality analysis, the geographical end points of data flows are studied. For content popularity analysis, YouTube videos are analyzed looking at the number of parallel sessions and content popularity distributions. Independent of the type of model, traffic measurements are the common denominator that provide input for the model parameters. In this paper, detailed traffic measurements performed as a part of the Celtic TRAMMS project are presented.