SCS

Abstract

Our analysis of residential broadband Internet traffic reveals a number of surprises in terms of the mental models we developed from the measurement literature. For example, we find that HTTP— not peer-to-peer—traffic dominates by a significant margin; that more often than not the home user’s immediate ISP connectivity contributes more to the round-trip times the user experiences than the WAN portion of the path; and that the DSL lines are frequently not the bottleneck in bulk-transfer performance.

Moreover, we note that applications often put their own traffic optimization strategies in place. Among the popular examples are Content Distribution Networks, large content providers with multiple data centers around the world, as well as P2P networks. However, these applications rarely respect or even consider the underlying network. To overcome this, we suggest that applications and ISPs should collaborate. We propose and evaluate the feasibility of a solution using as ISP offered information service. 16