An Examination of Information Retrieval Traffic on a Campus

This paper presents an analysis of TCP and IP traffic monitored on the University of California, Berkeley campus backbone. TCP connection-level data is analyzed to show the distribution of bytes, seconds, and connections among protocols. The connection-level data also shows the request/response, topological, and hourly distribution profiles of these protocols. IP packet-level data is analyzed to show the distribution of bytes and packets among protocols. Data regarding packet length for the protocols is also discussed. The analysis focuses on two primary issues, the amount of traffic related to emerging IR protocols such as gopher and WAIS and the characteristics of this traffic. Our study shows that these protocols account for a small amount of TCP traffic: 7 percent of total connections established and 3 percent of total bytes transferred. These IR protocols are characterized by short, small connections, in contrast to protocols such as telnet which have long, large connections. Our study also shows that TCP traffic accounts for approximately half of the bytes transferred by IP traffic, and that IR protocols have a tendency to have large packets, again in contrast to protocols such as telnet.