Content-aware Internet application traffic measurement and analysis

Abstract

As the Internet is quickly evolving from best-effort networks to business quality networks, billing based on the precise traffic measurement becomes an important issue for Internet service providers (ISP). Billing settlement is necessary not only between ISP and customers but also between ISP. Currently, most ISP use a flat rate charging policy. Besides the degree of difficulty in deriving appropriate charging policies agreeable by a concerned party, there are substantial technical challenges to come up with a good usage-based accounting system. Usage-based accounting depending on IP packet header information only is not sufficient any more due to the highly dynamic nature of the development and the use of the Internet applications such as peer-to-peer and network games. They use port numbers dynamically and even several applications can use the same port number. Thus, more precise means of classifying them and accounting for their traffic usage are required. In this paper, we propose a high performance, adaptable, configurable, and scalable content-aware application traffic measurement and analysis system which can achieve very accurate usage-based accounting.