The impact of residential broadband traffic on Japanese ISP backbones

This paper investigates the effects of the rapidly-growing residential broadband traffic on commercial ISP backbone networks. We collected month-long aggregated traffic logs for different traffic groups from seven major ISPs in Japan in order to analyze the macro-level impact of residential broad-band traffic. These traffic groups are carefully selected to be summable, and not to count the same traffic multiple times.Our results show that (1) the aggregated residential broad-band customer traffic in our data exceeds 100Gbps on average. Our data is considered to cover 41% of the total customer traffic in Japan, thus we can estimate that the total residential broadband traffic in Japan is currently about 250Gbps in total. (2) About 70% of the residential broadband traffic is constant all the time. The rest of the traffic has a daily fluctuation pattern with the peak in the evening hours. The behavior of residential broadband traffic deviates considerably from academic or office traffic. (3) The total traffic volume of the residential users is much higher than that of office users, so backbone traffic is dominated by the behavior of the residential user traffic. (4) The traffic volume exchanged through domestic private peering is comparable with the volume exchanged through the major IXes. (5) Within external traffic of ISPs, international traffic is about 23% for inbound and about 17% for outbound. (6) The distribution of the regional broadband traffic is roughly proportional to the regional population.We expect other countries will experience similar traffic patterns as residential broadband access becomes widespread.