Growth Trends in Wide-Area TCP Connections

We analyze the growth of a large research laboratory's widearea TCP connections over a period of three years. Our data consisted of seven month-long traces of all TCP connections made between the site and the rest of the world. We find that many TCP protocols exhibited exponential growth in the number of connections made and bytes transferred, even though the number of hosts at the site only grew linearly. The exponential growth of most of the major TCP protocols began tapering off with the final datasets, while relatively new information-retrieval protocols such as Gopher and WorldWide Web exhibited explosive growth during the same time. Our study also found that individual users greatly affected the site's traffic profile by the inadvertent or casual initiation of multiple, periodic wide-area connections; that exponential growth is fed in part by more users "discovering" the Internet and in part by existing users increasingly incorporating use of the Internet into their work patterns..