Obtaining application-based and content-based internet traffic statistics

Understanding Internet traffic is crucial in order to facilitate academic research and practical network engineering, e.g. when doing traffic classification, prioritization of traffic, creating realistic scenarios and models for Internet traffic development etc. In this paper we demonstrate how the Volunteer-Based System for Research on the Internet, developed at Aalborg University, is capable of providing detailed statistics of Internet usage. Since an increasing amount of HTTP traffic has been observed during the last few years, the system also supports creating statistics of different kinds of HTTP traffic, like audio, video, file transfers, etc. All statistics can be obtained for individual users of the system, for groups of users, or for all users altogether. This paper presents results with real data collected from a limited number of real users over six months. We demonstrate that the system can be useful for studying characteristics of computer network traffic in application-oriented or content-type- oriented way, and is now ready for a larger-scale implementation. The paper is concluded with a discussion about various applications of the system and possibilities of further enhancement.