Measurements from an Internet backbone link carrying TCP traffic towards different ADSL areas are analyzed in this paper. For traffic analysis, we adopt a flow based approach and the popular mice/elephants dichotomy. The originality of the experimental data reported in this paper, when compared with previous measurements from very high speed backbone links, is in that commercial traffic comprises a significant part generated by peer-to-peer applications. This kind of traffic exhibits some remarkable properties in terms of mice and elephants, which are described in this paper. It turns out that by adopting a suitable level of aggregation, the bit rate of mice can be described by means of a Gaussian process. The bit rate of elephants is smoother than that of mice and can also be well approximated by a Gaussian process.

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SUMMARYTo evaluate the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications on traffic in wide area networks, we analyze measurements from a high speed IP backbone link carrying TCP traffic towards several ADSL areas. The first observations are that the prevalent part of traffic is due to P2P applications (almost 80% of total traffic) and that the usage of network becomes symmetric in the sense that customers are not only clients but also servers. This latter point is observed by the significant proportion of long flows mainly composed of ACK segments. When analyzing the bit rate created by long flows, it turns out that the TCP connections due to P2P applications have a rather small bit rate and that there is no evidence for long range dependence. These facts are intimately related to the way P2P protocols are running. We separately analyze signaling traffic and data traffic. It turns out that by adopting a suitable level of aggregation, global traffic can be described by means of usual tele-traffic models based on M=G=1 queues with Weibullian service times. Copyright # 2004 AEI.

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