Internet traffic is the flow of
data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted ...
within the entire
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
, or in certain network links of its constituent networks. Common traffic measurements are total volume, in units of multiples of the
byte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
, or as transmission rates in bytes per certain time units.
As the topology of the Internet is not hierarchical, no single point of measurement is possible for total Internet traffic. Traffic data may be obtained from the
Tier 1 network
A Tier 1 network is an Internet Protocol (IP) network that can reach every other network on the Internet solely via settlement-free interconnection (also known as settlement-free peering). Tier 1 networks can exchange traffic with other Tier 1 net ...
providers' peering points for indications of volume and growth. However, Such data excludes traffic that remains within a single service provider's network and traffic that crosses private peering points.
As of December 2022
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
and
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
controls almost half(48%) of the Internet traffic where as once a majority but now
North America
North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...
,
Europe’s share got reduced to a quarter of the traffic of global internet.
Traffic sources
File sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...
constitutes a fraction of Internet traffic. The prevalent technology for file sharing is the
BitTorrent protocol, which is a
peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer n ...
(P2P) system mediated through indexing sites that provide resource directories. According to a Sandvine Research in 2013, Bit Torrent’s share of Internet traffic decreased by 20% to 7.4% overall, reduced from 31% in 2008.
Traffic management
![Internet Connectivity Distribution & Core](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Internet_Connectivity_Distribution_%26_Core.svg)
The Internet does not employ any formally centralized facilities for traffic management. Its progenitor networks, especially the
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
established an early
backbone
The backbone is the vertebral column of a vertebrate.
Arts, entertainment, and media Film
* ''Backbone'' (1923 film), a 1923 lost silent film starring Alfred Lunt
* ''Backbone'' (1975 film), a 1975 Yugoslavian drama directed by Vlatko Gilić
M ...
infrastructure which carried traffic between major interchange centers for traffic, resulting in a tiered, hierarchical system of
internet service providers
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privatel ...
(ISPs) within which the
tier 1 network
A Tier 1 network is an Internet Protocol (IP) network that can reach every other network on the Internet solely via settlement-free interconnection (also known as settlement-free peering). Tier 1 networks can exchange traffic with other Tier 1 net ...
s provided traffic exchange through settlement-free peering and routing of traffic to lower-level tiers of ISPs. The dynamic growth of the worldwide network resulted in ever-increasing interconnections at all peering levels of the Internet, so a robust system was developed that could mediate link failures, bottlenecks, and other congestion at many levels.
Economic traffic management (ETM) is the term that is sometimes used to point out the opportunities for
seeding
The term seeding and related terms such as seeded are used in several different contexts:
*Sowing, planting seeds in a place or on an object
*Cloud seeding, manipulating cloud formations
*Seeding (computing), a concept in computing and peer-to-pee ...
as a practice that caters to contribution within peer-to-peer file sharing and the distribution of content in the digital world in general.
Internet use tax
A planned
tax
A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, or n ...
on Internet use in
Hungary
Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...
introduced a 150-
forint
The forint (sign Ft; code HUF) is the currency of Hungary. It was formerly divided into 100 fillér, but fillér coins are no longer in circulation. The introduction of the forint on 1 August 1946 was a crucial step in the post-World War II stab ...
(US$0.62, €0.47) tax per
gigabyte
The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix ''giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB.
This defini ...
of data traffic, in a move intended to reduce Internet traffic and also assist companies to offset corporate income tax against the new levy.
Hungary achieved 1.15 billion gigabytes in 2013 and another 18 million gigabytes accumulated by mobile devices. This would have resulted in extra revenue of 175 billion forints under the new tax based on the consultancy firm eNet.
According to Yahoo News, economy minister
Mihály Varga
Mihály Varga (born 26 January 1965) is a Hungarian politician, current Minister of Finance (previously Minister of National Economy) since 2013. He also served as Minister of Finance between 2001 and 2002. He has been a member of Fidesz since t ...
defended the move saying "the tax was fair as it reflected a shift by consumers to the Internet away from phone lines" and that "150 forints on each transferred gigabyte of data – was needed to plug holes in the 2015 budget of one of the EU’s most indebted nations".
Some people argue that the new plan on Internet tax would prove disadvantageous to the country’s
economic development
In the economics study of the public sector, economic and social development is the process by which the economic well-being and quality of life of a nation, region, local community, or an individual are improved according to targeted goals and o ...
, limit access to information and hinder the freedom of expression. Approximately 36,000 people have signed up to take part in an event on Facebook to be held outside the Economy Ministry to protest against the possible tax.
Traffic classification
Traffic classification
Traffic classification is an automated process which categorises computer network traffic according to various parameters (for example, based on port number or protocol) into a number of ''traffic classes''. Each resulting traffic class can be t ...
describes the methods of classifying traffic by observing features passively in the traffic and line with particular classification goals. There might be some that only have a vulgar classification goal. For example, whether it is bulk transfer, peer-to-peer
file-sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...
, or transaction-orientated. Some others will set a finer-grained classification goal, for instance, the exact number of applications represented by the traffic. Traffic features included port number, application payload, temporal, packet size, and the characteristic of the traffic. There is a vast range of methods to allocate Internet traffic including exact traffic, for instance,
port (computer networking)
In computer networking, a port is a number assigned to uniquely identify a connection endpoint and to direct data to a specific service. At the software level, within an operating system, a port is a logical construct that identifies a specific ...
number, payload, heuristic, or statistical machine learning.
Accurate network traffic classification is elementary to quite a few Internet activities, from security monitoring to accounting and from the quality of service to providing operators with useful forecasts for long-term provisioning. Yet, classification schemes are extremely complex to operate accurately due to the shortage of available knowledge of the network. For example, the packet header-related information is always insufficient to allow for a precise methodology.
Bayesian analysis techniques
Work involving supervised
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
to classify network traffic. Data are hand-classified (based upon flow content) to one of a number of categories. A combination of data set (hand-assigned) category and descriptions of the classified flows (such as flow length, port numbers, time between consecutive flows) are used to train the classifier. To give a better insight of the technique itself, initial assumptions are made as well as applying two other techniques in reality. One is to improve the quality and separation of the input of information leading to an increase in accuracy of the
Naive Bayes classifier
In statistics, naive Bayes classifiers are a family of simple "probabilistic classifiers" based on applying Bayes' theorem with strong (naive) independence assumptions between the features (see Bayes classifier). They are among the simplest Baye ...
technique.
The basis of categorizing work is to classify the type of Internet traffic; this is done by putting common groups of applications into different categories, e.g., "normal" versus "malicious", or more complex definitions, e.g., the identification of specific applications or specific
Transmission Control Protocol
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly ...
(TCP) implementations. Adapted from Logg et al.
Survey
Traffic classification is a major component of automated intrusion detection systems. They are used to identify patterns as well as an indication of network resources for priority customers, or to identify customer use of network resources that in some way contravenes the operator’s terms of service.
Generally deployed
Internet Protocol
The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet.
IP h ...
(IP) traffic classification techniques are based approximately on a direct inspection of each packet’s contents at some point on the network. Source address, port and destination address are included in successive IP packets with similar if not the same 5-tuple of protocol type. ort are considered to belong to a flow whose controlling application we wish to determine. Simple classification infers the controlling application’s identity by assuming that most applications consistently use well-known TCP or UDP port numbers. Even though, many candidates are increasingly using unpredictable port numbers. As a result, more sophisticated classification techniques infer application types by looking for application-specific data within the TCP or
User Datagram Protocol
In computer networking, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core communication protocols of the Internet protocol suite used to send messages (transported as datagrams in packets) to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network. ...
(UDP) payloads.
Global Internet traffic
Aggregating from multiple sources and applying usage and bitrate assumptions,
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...
, a major network systems company, has published the following historical
Internet Protocol
The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet.
IP h ...
(IP) and Internet traffic figures:
["Visual Networking Index"](_blank)
Cisco Systems
"Fixed Internet traffic" refers perhaps to traffic from residential and commercial subscribers to ISPs, cable companies, and other service providers. "Mobile Internet traffic" refers perhaps to backhaul traffic from cellphone towers and providers. The overall "Internet traffic" figures, which can be 30% higher than the sum of the other two, perhaps factors in traffic in the core of the national backbone, whereas the other figures seem to be derived principally from the network periphery.
Cisco also publishes 5-year projections.
Internet backbone traffic in the United States
The following data for the Internet backbone in the US comes from the Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS):
[Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS)](_blank)
, University of Minnesota
The Cisco data can be seven times higher than the Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) data not only because the Cisco figures are estimates for the global—not just the domestic US—Internet, but also because Cisco counts "general IP traffic (thus including closed networks that are not truly part of the Internet, but use IP, the Internet Protocol, such as the IPTV services of various telecom firms)". The MINTS estimate of US national backbone traffic for 2004, which may be interpolated as 200 petabytes/month, is a plausible three-fold multiple of the traffic of the US's largest backbone carrier,
Level(3) Inc., which claims an average traffic level of 60 petabytes/month.
[2004 Annual Report, Level(3), April 2005, p.1]
Edholm's law
Internet bandwidth
In computing, bandwidth is the maximum rate of data transfer across a given path. Bandwidth may be characterized as network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth.
This definition of ''bandwidth'' is in contrast to the field of signal p ...
in
telecommunication network
A telecommunications network is a group of nodes interconnected by telecommunications links that are used to exchange messages between the nodes. The links may use a variety of technologies based on the methodologies of circuit switching, message ...
s has been doubling every 18 months, an observation expressed as
Edholm's law.
This follows the advances in
semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical resistivity and conductivity, electrical conductivity value falling between that of a electrical conductor, conductor, such as copper, and an insulator (electricity), insulator, such as glas ...
technology, such as
metal-oxide-silicon (MOS) scaling, exemplified by the MOSFET transistor, which has shown similar scaling described by
Moore's law
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empir ...
. In the 1980s,
fiber-optical technology using
laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word "laser" is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". The fir ...
light as information carriers accelerated the transmission speed and bandwidth of telecommunication circuits. This has led to the bandwidths of
communication networks
A telecommunications network is a group of nodes interconnected by telecommunications links that are used to exchange messages between the nodes. The links may use a variety of technologies based on the methodologies of circuit switching, messag ...
achieving
terabit per second
In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits (bitrate), characters or symbols (baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are multi ...
transmission speeds.
See also
*
ETOMIC
The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europea ...
*
Internet rush hour
*
Web traffic
Web traffic is the data sent and received by visitors to a website. Since the mid-1990s, web traffic has been the largest portion of Internet traffic. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are ...
*
Zettabyte Era
The Zettabyte Era or Zettabyte Zone is a period of human and computer science history that started in the mid-2010s. The precise starting date depends on whether it is defined as when the global IP traffic first exceeded one zettabyte, which happ ...
*
Traffic flow
In mathematics and transportation engineering, traffic flow is the study of interactions between travellers (including pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and their vehicles) and infrastructure (including highways, signage, and traffic control devi ...
References
Further reading
*
External links
"The Size and Growth Rate of the Internet" K.G. Coffman and Andrew Odlyzki, ''
First Monday
''First Monday'' is an American legal drama television series which aired on CBS during the midseason replacement from January 15 to May 3, 2002. The series centered on the U.S. Supreme Court. Like another 2002 series, '' The Court'', it was i ...
'', Volume 3, Number 5, October 1998
Internet Traffic Reportfrom AnalogX
Internet Health Reportfrom Keynote Systems
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140514062253/http://www.caida.org/home/ , date=2014-05-14 (CAIDA), based at the
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...
Supercomputer Center
Computer network analysis