Longitudinal study of Internet traffic from 1998-2003

Marina Fomenkov, Ken Keys, David Moore, and kc claffy
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis - CAIDA
San Diego Supercomputer Center,
University of California, San Diego

There is growing interest in capturing and analyzing Internet traffic characteristics in pursuit of insights into its evolution. We present a study of one of the few sources of publically available long-term Internet traffic workload data, namely the NLANR PMA archive of packet header traces. Trace samples were collected at a number of academic, research, and commercial sites during years 1998-2003. We consider four metrics of traffic: bytes, packets, flows, and number of source-destination pairs. We also analyze the composition of traffic by protocol.