Inter-AS Traffic Patterns and Their Implications

Abstract:

This paper reports on a study of traffic patterns among
Autonomous Systems (ASes), based on traces taken at various points in
the Internet. The traces display a highly non-uniform distribution of
traffic on flows between pairs of hosts, networks, and
ASes, accentuates this non-uniform distribution. In one typical trace,
for example, the top 9% of flows between ASes accounts for 86.7% of
the pack ets and 90.7% of the bytes transmitted. A highly non-uniform
traffic pattern sug gests that routers need to maintain only limited
QoS flow state. The paper discusses the implications of this
phenomenon on different proposed QoS mechanisms.