Investigating an ISP´s Core Network in 2014

Modern broadband networks facilitate the communication needs of a large amount of customers and carry large amounts of traffic. Monitoring the nature of this traffic in a timely manner can provide useful insights to researchers for conducting accurate simulations that adhere to the reality of Internet traffic. For instance, the traffic load observed inside an ISP´s network presents fluctuations at different time granularities. This paper presents an empirical study of monitoring several links within the core network of PrimeTel, a private ISP in Cyprus. SNMP and NetFlow data were collected. This diverse dataset was used to identify network traffic statistics as well as operational characteristics of network devices that make up an ISP´s core network. Thus, the traffic patterns at different levels and time granularities is examined in addition to the operation of network devices.