Traditional IP measurements: What changes in a today multimedia IP network

In this paper we present measurement results collected from real traces on the network of FastWeb, an Italian ISP which is the main broadband telecommunication company in Italy. The network relies on a fully IP architecture and delivers to the user data, VoIP and IPTV services over a single broadband connection. The aims of this work are the evaluation of traditional measurement indexes in a novel network environment with a mixture of traffic generated by various services and the identification of possible changes of the traffic properties due to this traffic mixture. Our measurement campaign, based on passive techniques, provides traffic characterization at both the packet and the connection/flow levels and focuses on time evolution, distributions, long range dependence and periodicity properties. We discover that the main characteristics of data traffic are kept unmodified, showing LRD properties both at the packet and flow levels. VoIP and IPTV traffic instead presents periodicities of the packet arrival process, due to periodicity of the sources. Considering the VoIP flow arrival process, the traditional Markovian assumption still holds true.