The Lockdown Effect Article Swipe
YOU?
·
· 2020
· Open Access
·
· DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3419394.3423658
· OA: W4288079450
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments imposed lock downs that forced\nhundreds of millions of citizens to stay at home. The implementation of\nconfinement measures increased Internet traffic demands of residential users,\nin particular, for remote working, entertainment, commerce, and education,\nwhich, as a result, caused traffic shifts in the Internet core. In this paper,\nusing data from a diverse set of vantage points (one ISP, three IXPs, and one\nmetropolitan educational network), we examine the effect of these lockdowns on\ntraffic shifts. We find that the traffic volume increased by 15-20% almost\nwithin a week--while overall still modest, this constitutes a large increase\nwithin this short time period. However, despite this surge, we observe that the\nInternet infrastructure is able to handle the new volume, as most traffic\nshifts occur outside of traditional peak hours. When looking directly at the\ntraffic sources, it turns out that, while hypergiants still contribute a\nsignificant fraction of traffic, we see (1) a higher increase in traffic of\nnon-hypergiants, and (2) traffic increases in applications that people use when\nat home, such as Web conferencing, VPN, and gaming. While many networks see\nincreased traffic demands, in particular, those providing services to\nresidential users, academic networks experience major overall decreases. Yet,\nin these networks, we can observe substantial increases when considering\napplications associated to remote working and lecturing.\n
