On Profiling Residential Customers

Some recent large scale studies on residential networks (ADSL and FTTH) have provided important insights concerning the set of applications used in such networks. For instance, it is now apparent that Web based traffic is dominating again at the expense of P2P traffic in lots of countries due to the surge of HTTP streaming and possibly social networks. In this paper we confront the analysis of the overall (high level) traffic characteristics of the residential network with the study of the users traffic profiles. We propose approaches to tackle those issues and illustrate them with traces from an ADSL platform. Our main findings are that even if P2P still dominates the first heavy hitters, the democratization of Web and Streaming traffic is the main cause of the come-back of HTTP. Moreover, the mixture of applications study highlights that these two classes (P2P vs. Web + Streaming) are almost never used simultaneously by our residential customers.