A five year perspective of traffic pattern evolution in a residential broadband access network

In this paper we describe a systematic study on long-term evolution of residential broadband Internet traffic covering 5 calendar years from June 2007 to May 2011. The traffic evolution is characterized both in the term of the total traffic volume, as well as the traffic volumes and shares for different application categories (file sharing, video streaming etc.), with the focus on comparing the traffic on the per IP user basis and among different broadband subscription groups. The results show that the average daily total traffic generated by each private end user increased only by about 33 % during the past 5 years. Further, the results show that the P2P file-sharing has been dominating the network total traffic, but the daily file-sharing traffic volume per end user largely remains the same. Also, the daily streaming-media traffic volume per end user has increased dramatically by over 500% during the studied period of time. In the meantime, the daily web-browsing traffic volume per end user has increased by about 300%. Finally, a further investigation among 4 different FTTH broadband subscription groups with 1, 10, 30, and 100 Mbit/s symmetric access speeds shows that the lower the access speed, the more diversified the end user traffic tend to be.