TRAMMS: Monitoring the evolution of residential broadband Internet traffic

Traffic measurements in broadband access networks are crucial from several points of view. A better understanding of traffic patterns can lead to more efficient network design, which leads to energy and cost savings for the operator and improved end user services. This paper reports on selected traffic measurement results from the Celtic TRAMMS project. The measurements were performed in broadband access networks in Sweden and Spain. The vast majority of the traffic volume is video based and from peer-to-peer applications. This suggests that future access networks should be symmetrical in order to properly cope with the traffic patterns of the future. Geographic locality of end-to-end flows has been identified for incoming and outgoing traffic in Spain, which may be used to analyze peering between ISP's. Finally, we show that stricter legislation in Sweden targeting illegal file sharing led to a dramatic decrease of the traffic. This means that factors not controlled by the networking community may seriously impact traffic patterns and user behaviour thereby indicating the need for closer collaboration between researchers and network designers on one side and politicians and regulators on the other side.