Detailed Analysis of Skype Traffic

Abstract

Skype is beyond any doubt the VoIP application in the current Internet application spectrum. Its amazing success has drawn the attention of telecom operators and the research community, both interested in knowing its internal mechanisms, characterizing its traffic, understanding its users' behavior. In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of traffic streams generated by voice and video communications, and the signaling traffic generated by Skype. Our approach is twofold, as we make use of both active and passive measurement techniques to gather a deep understanding on the traffic Skype generates. From extensive testbed experiments, we devise a source model which takes into account: i) the service type, i.e., SkypeOut calls or calls between two Skype clients, ii) the selected source Codec, iii) the adopted transport layer protocol, and iv) network conditions. Leveraging on the use of an accurate Skype classification engine that we recently proposed, we study and characterize Skype traffic based on extensive passive measurements collected from our campus LAN.