The Internet and the way people use it are constantly changing. Knowing traffic is crucial for operating the network, understanding users' needs, and ultimately improving applications. Here, we provide an in-depth longitudinal view of Internet traffic during 5 years (from 2013 to 2017). We take the point of the view of a national-wide ISP and analyze rich flow-level measurements to pinpoint and quantify changes. We observe the traffic, both from a point of view of users and services. We show that an ordinary broadband subscriber downloaded in 2017 more than twice as much as they used to do 5 years before. Bandwidth hungry video services drove this change at the beginning, while recently social messaging applications contribute to increase of data consumption. We study how protocols and service infrastructures evolve over time, highlighting events that may challenge traffic management policies. In the rush to bring servers closer and closer to users, we witness the birth of the sub-millisecond Internet, with caches located directly at ISP edges. The picture we take shows a lively Internet that always evolves and suddenly changes. To support new analyses, we make anonymized data available at https://smartdata.polito.it/five-years-at-the-edge/.

中文翻译：

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边缘五年：从 ISP 网络观察互联网


互联网和人们使用互联网的方式在不断变化。了解流量对于运营网络、了解用户需求以及最终改进应用程序至关重要。在这里，我们提供了 5 年（2013 年至 2017 年）互联网流量的深入纵向视图。我们从全国 ISP 的角度出发，分析丰富的流量水平测量结果，以查明和量化变化。我们从用户和服务的角度观察流量。我们发现，2017 年普通宽带用户的下载量是 5 年前的两倍多。带宽需求旺盛的视频服务从一开始就推动了这一变化，而最近的社交消息应用则导致了数据消耗的增加。我们研究协议和服务基础设施如何随着时间的推移而演变，突出显示可能挑战流量管理策略的事件。在让服务器与用户越来越接近的过程中，我们见证了亚毫秒级互联网的诞生，其缓存直接位于 ISP 边缘。我们拍摄的这张照片展示了一个充满活力的互联网，它总是在进化和突然变化。为了支持新的分析，我们在 https://smartdata.polito.it/ Five-years-at-the-edge/ 上提供匿名数据。