Growth Trends in Wide-Area TCP Connections

                                Vern Paxson
                      Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and
             EECS Division, University of California, Berkeley
                              vern@ee.lbl.gov

We analyze the growth of a large research laboratory's wide-area TCP
connections over a period of three years.  Our data consisted of seven
month-long traces of all TCP connections made between the site and the rest
of the world.  We find that many TCP protocols exhibited exponential growth
in the number of connections made and bytes transferred, even though the
number of hosts at the site only grew linearly.  The exponential growth of
most of the major TCP protocols began tapering off with the final datasets,
while relatively new information-retrieval protocols such as Gopher and
World-Wide Web exhibited explosive growth during the same time.  Our study
also found that individual users greatly affected the site's traffic
profile by the inadvertent or casual initiation of multiple, periodic
wide-area connections; that exponential growth is fed in part by more users
``discovering'' the Internet and in part by existing users increasingly
incorporating use of the Internet into their work patterns; and that
wide-area traffic geography is diverse and dynamic.