Measuring internet traffic

Despite its great success, the current Internet architecture has serious shortcomings and there is a growing consensus among researchers that it is only a matter of time when a fundamental reform will be needed. For the past six years, we at Aalto University have worked intensively on a new “clean-slate” internet architecture based on the information-centric publish/subscribe paradigm. The biggest challenge to any new internet architecture is that it has to be able to scale up to hundreds of billions of nodes. To be able to evaluate the performance and scalability of any new architecture, we need reliable information about the traffic patterns of the current Internet. This is especially important in determining the efficiency of caching which is done intensively in information-centric networking (ICN). This presentation deals with the challenges of obtaining such information as well as the work done and future plans to address these issues.