Monitoring three National Research Networks for Eight Weeks: Observations and Implications

With the advent of dynamic and elusive distributed applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing systems, network administrators find it increasingly difficult to understand the types of applications running in their networks and the amount of traffic each application produces. In this paper, we present measurement results from the deployment of an accurate traffic characterization application in three national research and education networks for a period of two months. Our observations go beyond traffic distribution; we explore the application usage in terms of active IP addresses, the existence of IP addresses generating massive amounts of traffic, the asymmetry of incoming and outgoing traffic, and the existence of SPAM-sending mail servers.