We present BGPStream, an open-source software framework for the analysis of both historical and real-time Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) measurement data. Although BGP is a crucial operational component of the Internet infrastructure, and is the subject of research in the areas of Internet performance, security, topology, protocols, economics, etc., there is no efficient way of processing large amounts of distributed and/or live BGP measurement data. BGPStream fills this gap, enabling efficient investigation of events, rapid prototyping, and building complex tools and large-scale monitoring applications (e.g., detection of connectivity disruptions or BGP hijacking attacks). We discuss the goals and architecture of BGPStream. We apply the components of the framework to different scenarios, and we describe the development and deployment of complex services for global Internet monitoring that we built on top of it.

Cloud gaming is a class of services that promises to revolutionize the videogame market. It allows the user to play a videogame with essential equipment while using a remote server for the actual execution. The multimedia content is streamed through the network from the server to the user. Hence, this service requires low latency and a large bandwidth to work properly with low response time and high-definition video. Three of the leading tech companies (Google, Sony, and NVIDIA) entered this market with their products, and others, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also launching their platforms. However, these companies have released little information about their cloud gaming operation and how they utilize the network. In this work, we study cloud gaming services from the network point of view. We collect more than 200 packet traces under different application settings and network conditions from a broadband network to poor mobile network conditions, for 3 cloud gaming services, namely Stadia from Google, GeForce Now from NVIDIA and PS Now from Sony. We analyze the employed protocols and the workload that they impose on the network. We find that GeForce Now and Stadia use the RTP protocol to stream the multimedia content, with the latter relying on the standard WebRTC APIs. Depending on the network and video quality, they result in bandwidth-hungry services consuming up to 45 Mbit/s. PS Now instead uses only undocumented protocols and never exceeds 13 Mbit/s. 4G mobile networks can often sustain these loads, while traditional 3G connections struggle. The systems quickly react to deteriorated network conditions, and packet losses up to 5% do not cause a reduction in resolution.

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/.

The Internet and the way people use it are constantly changing. Knowing traffic is crucial for operating the network, understanding users' need, and ultimately improving applications. Here, we provide an in-depth longitudinal view of Internet traffic in the last 5 years (from 2013 to 2017). We take the point of the view of a national-wide ISP and analyze flow-level rich measurements to pinpoint and quantify trends. We evaluate the providers' costs in terms of traffic consumption by users and services. We show that an ordinary broadband subscriber nowadays downloads more than twice as much as they used to do 5 years ago. Bandwidth hungry video services drive this change, while social messaging applications boom (and vanish) at incredible pace. We study how protocols and service infrastructures evolve over time, highlighting unpredictable events that may hamper 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.

The third version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is in its final standardization phase by the IETF. Besides better security and increased flexibility, it promises benefits in terms of performance. HTTP/3 adopts a more efficient header compression schema and replaces TCP with QUIC, a transport protocol carried over UDP, originally proposed by Google and currently under standardization too. Although HTTP/3 early implementations already exist and some websites announce its support, it has been subject to few studies. We provide a first measurement study on HTTP/3 adoption and performance. We testify how it has been adopted by some of the leading Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Cloudflare in 2020. We run a large-scale measurement campaign towards thousands of websites adopting HTTP/3, aiming at understanding to what extent it achieves better performance than HTTP/2. We find that adopting websites often host most web page objects on third-party servers, which support only HTTP/2 or even HTTP/1.1. As excepted, websites loading objects from a limited set of third-party domains (avoiding legacy protocols) are those experiencing larger performance gains. Our experiments however show that HTTP/3 provides sizable benefits only in scenarios with high latency or poor bandwidth.