Measurements and characterization of traffic in a university environment

In this paper we characterize the traffic seen in a university environment, especially on the broadband medium which serves as the backbone. The traffic is characterized based on parameters such as the volume of traffic generated, the packet inter-arrival times, the packet size and the protocol type and application that generated the traffic. We use the packet train model to analyze and characterize the traffic. Network traffic being inherently bursty, we propose a practical definition for burstiness and evaluate the burstiness of the traffic measured. Finally we compare the appropriateness and relative efficiency of some of the tools used to measure network traffic and compare their performance.