[e2e] topological locality of Internet communication?

[Olivier Bonaventure]

Lars,

> since we were just talking about Internet statistics:
> 
> I'm looking to get a feel of how much topological locality Internet 
> communication exhibits, to calibrate some simulations we plan to run.
> 
> Is anyone aware of measurements of how many "AS hops" typical 
> connections cross in the Internet? Ideal would be a CDF of "AS hops 
> crossed" for connection percentages.

We did a detailed analysis of all the packets sent by our University
during one month and checked their topological distribution. 
You can find more information in the paper. I have also attached the
abstract.

S. Uhlig, V. Magnin, O. Bonaventure, C. Rapier, and L. Deri.
Implications of the topological properties of Internet traffic on
traffic engineering. In 19th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Special
Track on Computer Networks, March 2004.

In this paper we study the behavior of Internet traffic on the AS-level
topology and discuss its implications on interdomain traffic
engineering. We rely on two notable interdomain traffic traces, the
first is one month long and the other is one day long. This study shows
that interdomain paths are stable for a large majority of the traffic
from a routing viewpoint. We show that the aggregation of the traffic
occurring on the AS-level graph is essentially limited to direct peers,
with almost no aggregation occurring at larger AS hop distances.
Furthermore, only part of the AS paths of the AS-level topology that see
a lot of traffic are stable, when considering their presence among the
largest AS paths on a hourly basis. Relying on the largest AS paths in
traffic over a time window to capture the traffic over the next time
interval discloses the important variability of the traffic seen by the
largest AS paths in traffic. Interdomain traffic engineering is hence
due to be difficult because of the limited traffic aggregation on the
AS-level topology and the important topological variability of the
traffic for a significant percentage of the total traffic.

See http://totem.info.ucl.ac.be/publications.html

Best regards,

Olivier Bonaventure
-- 
CSE Dept. UCL, Belgium - http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/OBO/