Impact of provider failures on the traffic at a university campus

In this paper we characterize the impact of failures in Brazil´s national research network (RNP) on traffic at a large client university. We analyze reachability disruptions, caused by failures of RNP´s interdomain links, that block all international traffic. We also analyze performance disruptions, caused by simultaneous failure of multiple RNP intradomain links, which result in congestion and performance degradation. We study the impact of disruptions on traffic, application mix, and user behavior. Our results show that users adapt their behavior when some applications become unavailable and when network performance degrades. For example, users tend to migrate to Youtube when Facebook becomes unavailable during reachability disruptions; similarly, users migrate to Facebook when congestion during performance disruptions severely degrade Youtube experience. We also correlate the impact of disruptions to network topology and show that performance during a performance disruption depends on the location and importance of failed links.