An End-Host View on Local Traffic at Home and Work

This paper compares local and wide-area traffic from end-hosts connected to different home and work networks. We base our analysis on network and application traces collected from 47 end-hosts for at least one week. We compare traffic patterns in terms of number of connections, bytes, duration, and applications. Not surprisingly, wide-area traffic dominates local traffic for most users. Local connections are often shorter and smaller than Internet connections. Moreover, we find that name services (DNS) and network file systems are the most common local applications, whereas web surfing and P2P, which are the most popular applications in the wide-area, are not significant locally.