Flow-based characteristic analysis of Internet application traffic

Abstract – The necessity of IP traffic analysis is growing dramatically in many areas. With increasing network demands from individual users as well as business communities, the Internet is overwhelmed by diverse and complex types of traffic from various network-based applications. To analyze this sophisticated Internet environment, efficient methods and tools are desperately required. This paper presents general characteristics of the Internet application traffic together with application-level analysis from the perspective of flows. We analyze the IP traffic traces collected on the Internet junction at POSTECH, a university with over 6,000 end hosts and servers. In addition, using our flow grouping method we classify the IP traffic according to the corresponding applications, and we explore the flow-level characteristics of current network-based applications.