Flow Length and Size Distributions in Campus Internet Traffic

Efficiency of numerous flow-oriented solutions proposed in the literature strongly depends on traffic characteristics, and thus, should be assessed based on real traffic traces. For example, in case of traffic engineering mechanisms which base on the distinction between elephant and mice flows it is extremely important to ensure realistic distributions of flows' length (in packets) and size (in bytes). Credible data is not available in the literature. Numerous works contain only graphs presenting PDFs and CDFs of selected flow parameters, but none of these papers provides reusable data, like parameters of distributions mixtures fitting data being analyzed or even sources of presented plots. In this paper we provided flows, packets and bytes distributions in function of flows' length and size. We also fitted mixture of distributions to data plots and provided parameters of those distributions along with source code in the GitHub repository. The statistics were calculated based on the real traffic traces comprising 4 billions of flows and collected at the Internet-facing interface of campus network. Such a comprehensive analyses and precise parameters enable credible assessment of numerous novel mechanisms proposed by researchers and addressing resource provisioning, traffic engineering or reliability issues.