Rethinking the Building Block: A Profiling Methodology for UDP Flows

With the increase of network bandwidth, more and more new applications such as audio, video and online games have become the main body in network traffic. Based on real time considerations, these new applications mostly use UDP as transport layer protocol, which directly increase UDP traffic. However, traditional studies believe that TCP dominates the Internet traffic and previous traffic measurements were generally based on it while UDP was ignored. In view of this, we mainly discuss the profiling methodology of UDP flows in this paper. First, from the view of the network layer, we present a profiling methodology on the basis of the Claffy´s parameter flow model. Next, due to the significant differences among the different applications, we found that using a unified methodology and ignoring the information of application layer is not appropriate for UDP flows. At last, we get the conclusion that for different applications, such as dns, qq, we must use corresponding profiling methodology based on their specific characteristics.