On the Characteristics and Reasons of Long-lived Internet Flows

Quan, Lin and Heidemann, John
USC/Information Sciences Institute

citation

Lin Quan and John Heidemann 2010. On the Characteristics and Reasons of Long-lived Internet Flows. Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (Melbourne, Australia, Nov. 2010), 444–450. [DOI] [PDF]

abstract

Prior studies of Internet traffic have considered traffic at different resolutions and time scales: packets and flows for hours or days, aggregate packet statistics for days or weeks, and hourly trends for months. However, little is known about the long-term behavior of individual flows. In this paper, we study individual flows (as defined by the 5-tuple of protocol, source and destination IP address and port) over days and weeks. While the vast majority of flows are short, and most bytes are in short flows, we find that about 20% of the overall bytes are carried in flows that last longer than 10 minutes, and flows lasting 100 minutes or longer make up 2% of traffic. We show that long-lived flows are qualitatively different from short flows: they are generally slower, less bursty, and are due to different applications and protocols. We investigate the causes of short- and long-lived flows, and show that the traffic mix varies significantly depending on duration time scale, with computer-to-computer traffic more and more dominating in larger time scales.

reference

@inproceedings{Quan10a,
  author = {Quan, Lin and Heidemann, John},
  title = {On the Characteristics and Reasons of Long-lived Internet Flows},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference},
  year = {2010},
  sortdate = {2010-11-01},
  project = {ant, lacrend, lander, madcat},
  jsubject = {network_observation},
  pages = {444--450},
  address = {Melbourne, Australia},
  month = nov,
  publisher = {ACM},
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {ipv4 network traffic, long-lived flows, 2 weeks},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1879141.1879198},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Quan10a.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Quan10a.pdf},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  copyrightholder = {ACM},
  copyrightterms = {
  Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work
  for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that
  copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage
  and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first
  page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to
  redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
  fee.
  }
}

copyright

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.