On the complexity of Internet traffic dynamics on its topology

Most studies of Internet traffic rely on observations from a single link. The corresponding traffic dynamics has been studied for more than a decade and is well understood. The study of how traffic on the Internet topology, on the other hand, is poorly understood and has been largely limited to the distribution of traffic among source-destination pairs inside the studied network, also called the traffic matrix. In this paper, we make a first step towards understanding the way traffic gets distributed onto the whole topology of the Internet. For this, we rely on the traffic seen by a transit network, for a period of more than a week. As we are still at the stage of understanding the topological traffic distribution, we do not try to model the traffic dynamics. Rather we concentrate on understanding the complexity of describing the traffic observed by a transit network, how it maps onto the AS-level topology of the Internet and how it changes over time. For this, we rely on well-known tools of multi-variate analysis and multi-resolution analysis.