The growing complexity of the Internet has lead to an increasing interest in traffic measurements and analysis from the research community.

This has rapidly become an hot topic and, in the recent years, our group has started to invest more resources on it. We are currently working on the study of network traffic as can be observed at several points (LAN, WAN access nodes, backbone).

We are both interested in analyzing and to characterize aggregate Internet traffic and the traffic generated by specific applications (games, http, peer-to-peer,..).

Our measurement approach is multi-level (sessions, connections, flows, packets, ..) but with a major focus on packet-level analysis.

With a packet-level analysis we mean an approach in terms of packet size and inter-packet time. Such modeling approach is simple and at the same time offers the lowest/deepest point of view of network traffic. Network devices (Routers, Switches, Access Points) often operate on a packet-by-packet basis (i.e. buffer management), and network problems (Loss, Delay, Jitter) happen at packet level. Other advantages of studying traffic by observing IPT and PS are the avoidance of any assumption regarding the application-layer protocol characteristics, and the possibility to study, in the same manner, different kind of sources and even mixes of them.

Traffic analysis can be performed by adopting several techniques that come from signal processing, information theory, pattern recognition, statistical analysis and modeling, etc.