A study of traffic, user behavior and pricing policies in a large campus network

Tsinghua University campus network is a large campus network in China, providing volume-based and flat-rate Internet access service for more than 31,000 students and staff. In order to better understand its traffic, user behavior and pricing policies to facilitate network planning and management, we collect a one-year-long flow-based traffic log and a 10-year-long user-based log at the boundary of this campus network, and then conduct an analysis study on these two data sets. In this paper, we first present characteristics of inbound traffic flows from the aspects of traffic prediction and inference. Then we analyze the geographical origins of incoming flows, and the result reveals that USA, Japan and Korea are the most important source countries of international traffic. Our user-based investigation shows that the properties of users have important influence on their behavior, e.g., major has stronger influence on users’ online time, while occupation has stronger influence on users’ international traffic volume. We also find that there are more and more users choosing flat rate pricing scheme instead of volume based pricing scheme, and these users tend to over-provision when they subscribe from tiered pricing options.