the nature of the beast: recent traffic measurements from an Internet backbone

k claffy Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis - CAIDA
San Diego Supercomputer Center,
University of California, San Diego

Greg Miller and Kevin Thompson
MCI/vBNS

As described in last years Inet '97 paper [1], MCI has implemented a high-performance, low-cost monitoring system that can monitor Internet traffic (cell/packet headers) and perform analyses, and deployed them on OC-3 trunks within iMCI's backbone and also within the NSF-sponsored vBNS (very High performance Backbone Service). This publicly-available tool facilitates measurement and analysis of high-speed OC-3, and now OC-12, trunks that carry hundreds of thousands of simultaneous flows. As a follow up to last year's paper, we provide some new data analyses as well as comparisons with last year's data that may suggest trends in changing workload profiles. All the data in this paper is based on recent wide-area MCI Internet backbone traffic as recorded by the Coral monitors.