The impact of residential broadband traffic on Japanese ISP backbones

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of the rapidly-growing residential broadband traffic on commercial ISP backbone networks. We collected month-long aggregated traffic logs for different traffic groups from seven major ISPs in Japan in order to analyze the macro-level impact of residential broadband traffic. These traffic groups are carefully selected to be summable, and not to count the same traffic multiple times.Our results show that (1) the aggregated residential broadband customer traffic in our data exceeds 100Gbps on average. Our data is considered to cover 41% of the total customer traffic in Japan, thus we can estimate that the total residential broadband traffic in Japan is currently about 250Gbps in total. (2) About 70% of the residential broadband traffic is constant all the time. The rest of the traffic has a daily fluctuation pattern with the peak in the evening hours. The behavior of residential broadband traffic deviates considerably from academic or office traffic. (3) The total traffic volume of the residential users is much higher than that of office users, so backbone traffic is dominated by the behavior of the residential user traffic. (4) The traffic volume exchanged through domestic private peering is comparable with the volume exchanged through the major IXes. (5) Within external traffic of ISPs, international traffic is about 23% for inbound and about 17% for outbound. (6) The distribution of the regional broadband traffic is roughly proportional to the regional population.We expect other countries will experience similar traffic patterns as residential broadband access becomes widespread.

On dominant characteristics of residential broadband internet traffic

“…Previous work found that for consumers diurnal patterns start with activity in the morning, steadily increasing throughout the course of the day, with the height of activity starting in the early evening and lasting till midnight [19,17]. We see this same overall pattern in terms of the number of active DSL sessions, as shown in Figure 3.…”

“…This unique vantage point provides a broad view of residential traffic, enabling more comprehensive and detailed characterizations than was possible in previous work, such as Cho et al's studies based on backbone traces [19,9,10], other work that examined specific applications like P2P-assisted content distribution [27] and Skype [7], or studies using active measurements [12].…”

Network Planning for Dual Residential-Business Exploitation of Next-Generation Passive Optical Networks to Provide Symmetrical 1 Gb/s Services

“…Many measurement studies have reported that the empirically observed value of q is very small [13,14].…”

Photonic Network Technologies for New Generation Network

“…In the physical layer of the NWGN, high scalability, fine granularity, and flexibility will be very important, in addition to increased network capacity [5], [6]. In the NWGN, optical channels of varying granularity, such as path/burst/packet in the time domain and narCopyright c 2011 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers row/wide/bundle in the spectral domain, should be used as a pool of physical layer resources depending on the application (i.e., provider-by-provider, service-by-service, and so on) [5].…”