Tracking long-term growth of the NSFNET

K. Claffy and H.-W. Braun
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 NSFNET backbone and difficulties with using the collected statistics for long-term network forecasting of certain traffic aspects. We describe relevant aspects of the NSFNET backbone architecture and the instrumentation for statistics collection.

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 in an infrastructure whose protocol architecture and instrumentation for data collection was not designed to support such objectives.