It's well known that the rise of peer-to-peer applications have had a major impact on the unprecedented increase in the Internet traffic worldwide. This phenomenon is very much particular in Japan due to popularity of fiber access services. An analysis was done on few interesting incidents that were observed in the past 6 months at JPNAP, a major IX in Japan.
Before dawn on January 7 2006, a decline in aggregated traffic of about 20% at JPNAP was observed. We considered that quite a number of peer-to-peer windows machines rebooted automatically due to the emergency release of a Windows Update at that time. As a result a temporary traffic drop happened at JPNAP without any network troubles.
Also, few interesting incidents happened at FIFA World Cup in June 2006. We could detect an anomalous traffic decline and recovery during World Cup matches in which the Japanese team was playing. These traffic trends were reported at the major ISPs' backbones in Japan, also.
This phenomenon indicates that application behaviors of P2P machines and human activities in major social events could cause a huge impact on the Internet traffic. What does this mean to us network operators? There is a need to consider the possibility that such events could happen when we do network designs or scheduled maintenance work. If possible, we'd like to survey and compare the traffic statistics of other regions at the time of such events and to discuss the issue with operators.
About the Presenter
Yukiyasu Tarui is a network engineer at Internet Multifeed Co. In there, he has been developing and operating JPNAP service since 2000. He is responsible for a backbone architecture and traffic analyses of their networks. He's also involved as part of program committees at JANOG meeting.
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