Richard Bennett, NANOG posting, and Integrity

Mon Jul 28 17:03:47 UTC 2014

On Jul 28, 2014, at 9:52 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>>> It is not representative of the actual traffic flows on the Internet.
>> 
>> Traffic flows on the Internet is a different survey of a different thing.
> 
> He didn't mean "TCP Flows", I don't think; he was simply -- as I 
> understood him -- talking about the 40,000ft view of connections between
> pieces of the Internet. I don't expect your dataset to have flow-level data, and I don't think
> he did either.

How else do you get a representative measurement of “actual traffic flows on the Internet?”

We’ve got adjacency information.  Telegeography has hand-waving 40,000 ft. flow estimates in the form of different widths of arrows on a map.  But if you want to know how large actual flows of data are between two regions of the Internet, and you can’t actually instrument the whole Internet, you need two things: (1) a broad and representative sampling of flow data, and (2) a complete measurement of a few portions of the network that are represented in the sampled set.  That gives you a horizontal and a vertical view, from which you can extrapolate to a whole, or any other part, with some minor assurance of reasonability.

If someone has an easier methodology to suggest, that still produces usable results, I’m all ears.

> it isn't really germane to the conversation we're having.

I thought I’d made that point?

                                -Bill

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 841 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20140728/18969736/attachment.sig>