Growth trends in wide-area TCP connections

Abstract

A recently completed single-site study has yielded information about how Internet traffic will evolve, as new users discover the Internet and existing users find new ways to incorporate the Internet into their work patterns. The author reviews existing statistics and studies of network growth, which show that network traffic generally grows exponentially with time, at least until the network carrying capacity is reached. He then describes how he captured and reduced the data used in this study. The following points are also addressed: the overall growth in the site's wide-area traffic; the appearance of periodic traffic; the growth in network use by individual computers or users; and the changing geographic profile of the traffic. The implications and limitations of the results are also summarizes.<>