Growth Trends in Wide-Area TCP Connections

TitleGrowth Trends in Wide-Area TCP Connections
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication1994
AuthorsPaxson, V.
Published inIEEE Network
Page(s)8-17
Other Numbers1607
Abstract

We analyze the growth of a large research laboratory's wide-area TCP connections over a period of three years. Our data consisted of eight 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. While the exponential growth of some of the protocols began tapering off with the final datasets, relatively new information-retrieval protocols such as Gopher and World-Wide 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; and that wide-area traffic geography is diverse and dynamic.

Bibliographic Notes

IEEE Network, Vol. 8 No. 4, pp. 8-17

Abbreviated Authors

V. Paxson

ICSI Research Group

Networking and Security

ICSI Publication Type

Article in journal or magazine