Gregor Maier, Anja Feldmann, Vern Paxson, Mark Allman. On Dominant Characteristics of Residential Broadband Internet Traffic. ACM SIGCOMM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference, November 2009.
PDF

Abstract:

While residential broadband Internet access is popular in many parts of the world, only a few studies have examined the characteristics of such traffic. In this paper we describe observations from monitoring the network activity for more than 20,000~residential DSL customers in an urban area. To ensure privacy, all data is immediately anonymized. We augment the anonymized packet traces with information about DSL-level sessions, IP (re-)assignments, and DSL link bandwidth.

Our analysis reveals a number of surprises in terms of the mental models we developed from the measurement literature. For example, we find that HTTP---not peer-to-peer---traffic dominates by a significant margin; that more often than not the home user's immediate ISP connectivity contributes more to the round-trip times the user experiences than the WAN portion of the path; and that the DSL lines are frequently not the bottleneck in bulk-transfer performance.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{MFPA09,
    author    = "Gregor Maier and Anja Feldmann and Vern Paxson and Mark Allman",
    title     = "{On Dominant Characteristics of Residential Broadband Internet Traffic}",
    booktitle = "ACM SIGCOMM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference",
    year      = 2009,
    month     = nov,
}