The length of measurement period to determine the application profile for traffic classification in the Internet

We discuss the aspect of measurement period length in the detection of dynamic application profiles in the future Internet solutions requiring automatic network based traffic differentiation. We base the analysis on a measurement-based method to form dynamic application profiles and observe the effect of the measurement period of the quantity and quality on the dynamic application profile. We see that the detected traffic profiles are of reasonable size and contain relevant applications. The results indicate that the measurement period has to be several hours in length and that the measurement process should be ongoing to ensure a valid and stabilized application set.