Long-term traffic aspects of the NSFNET

K. Claffy and H.-W. Braun, and G. Polyzos
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis - CAIDA
San Diego Supercomputer Center,
University of California, San Diego

G. Polyzos
University of California, San Diego

We present the architecture for data collection for the T3 NSFNET backbone service, and difficulties with using the collected statistics for long-term network forecasting of certain traffic aspects. We describe relevant aspects of the T3 backbone architecture, describe the instrumentation for the statistics collection process, and how it differs from that on the T1 backbone. We then present long-term NSFNET data to elucidate long term trends in both the reachability of Internet components via the NSFNET as well as the growing cross-section of traffic. We focus on the difficulties of forecasting and planning for these two traffic aspects in an infrastructure whose protocol architecture and instrumentation for data collection was not designed to support such objectives.