Unmasking the Growing UDP Traffic in a Campus Network

Abstract

Abstract. Transmission control protocol (TCP) has been the dominating protocol for Internet traffic for the past decades. Most network research based on traffic analysis (e.g., router buffer sizing and traffic classification) has been conducted assuming the dominance of TCP over other protocols. However, a few recent traffic statistics are showing a sign of significant UDP traffic growth at various points of Internet links [26]. In this paper we show that the UDP traffic has grown significantly in recent years on our campus network; we have observed a 46-fold increase in volume (from 0.47% to 22.0% of total bytes) in the past four years. The trace collected in 2011 shows that the grown volume is not from a small number of UDP hosts nor port numbers. In addition, the recent UDP flows are not sent at constant bit rate (CBR) for most cases, and the aggregated traffic shows burstiness close to TCP traffic.

IP packet interleaving for UDP bursty losses

“…This increasing trend in UDP usage has been seen all over the world, with a peak in data from China where UDPbased p2p IPTV traffic is already common. Finally, recent studies confirm this trend: in [52] the authors have observed a relevant increase in terms of UDP traffic volume. More precisely, by continuously monitoring the same link for four years they found a 46-fold increase in volume (from 0.47% to 22.0% of total bytes).…”

“…Our choice is motivated by the expected rise of UDP traffic volume [49,50,51,52], which steps from the momentum of applications (e.g. DNS, VoIP, streaming, p2p IPTV, etc.…”

UDP traffic classification using most distinguished port

“…Since UDP applications are usually using ephemeral port, the traditional port number based application type inference may not work [3]. KISS [15] is a statistical inference based UDP traffic classifier which use signatures derived from either the geometric distance among samples or Support Vector Machines.…”

“…It is reported that from 2008 to 2011, UDP traffic share has increased significantly (from 0.47% to 22.0% in total traffic) [3]. The increase of UDP traffic share is often attributed to new streaming applications and P2P applications, since these applications tend to use UDP to avoid traffic shaping.…”

A novel queue-aware wireless link adaptation mechanism and its fixed-point analytical model

“…Along with the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) whose use has gained momentum with emerging multimedia and P2P applications, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has been one of the most widely used transport protocols for most Internet services such as Web browsing, file transfer, remote login, and recently for video streaming [1][2][3]. Buffer management for routers carrying TCP traffic is generally based on active queue management (AQM) mechanisms which drop packets before the routers' queues become full [4][5][6][7][8].…”