Measuring the Internet

Internet traffic behavior has been resistant to modeling. The reasons derive from the Internet's evolution as a composition of independently developed and deployed protocols, technologies and core applications. Moreover, this evolution has experienced no equilibrium thus far. A common complaint about traffic measurement studies is that they do not sustain relevance in an environment where the traffic, technology and topology change faster than we can measure them. Moreover, the proliferation of media and protocols make the acquisition of traffic data almost prohibitively complicated and costly, and finally, the time required to analyze and validate data means that most research efforts are obsolete by the time the findings are published. Thus, far from having an analytic handle on the Internet, we lack the ability even to measure traffic at a granularity that would enable infrastructure-level research. As a result, while the core of the Internet continues its rapid evolution, measurement and modeling of it progress at a leisurely pace. However, both active and passive measurements of the Internet do occur, as do analyses of the routing and IP addressing system.