Structural insights on Internet traffic: Community overlapping and correlations

Abstract

There is an increasing number of Internet applications, which leads to an increasing network capacity and availability. Internet traffic characterisation and application identification are, therefore, more important for efficient network management. In this paper, we construct flow graphs from detailed Internet traffic data collected from the public networks of Internet Service Providers. We analyse the community structures of the flow graph that is naturally formed by different applications. The community size, degree distribution of the community, and community overlap of 10 Internet applications are investigated. We further study the correlations between the communities from different applications. Our results provide deep insights into the behaviour Internet applications and traffic, which is helpful for both network management and user behaviour analysis.