Five Blind Men and the Internet: Towards an Understanding of Internet Traffic
Abstract
Our current view of traffic on the Internet-the world’s largest and most pervasive network-comes from a variety of perspectives, each with its own blind spots and biases. In this paper, we make the case for using publicly available Internet exchange point (IXP) statistics as a complementary vantage point. While IXP data has its own limitations, it is fine-grained, accessible, and independently verifiable-offering a distinct perspective on Internet usage patterns. We present results from a two-year study (2023-2024) of 472 IXPs worldwide, capturing approximately 300 Tbps of peak daily aggregate traffic by late 2024. Over this period, aggregate IXP traffic increased by 49.2% (24.5% annualized), with regionally distinct diurnal patterns and event-driven anomalies. These results provide an accessible framework for researchers and operators to study the Internet’s evolving ecosystem from an IXP-based perspective, and lay the groundwork for systematic, global-scale detection of network anomalies and outages.
Research Areas: Data-Driven Networking and Network Analysis and Reasoning
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BibTex
@inproceedings{kirci2026five,
author = {Kirci, Ege Cem and Mishra, Ayush and Vanbever, Laurent},
title = {{Five Blind Men and the Internet: Towards an Understanding of Internet Traffic}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026)},
year = {2026},
month = {feb},
day = {10},
location = {Online}
}Research Collection: 20.500.11850/783534