There is no centralized control over all the providers in the
Internet. The providers do not always coordinate their efforts with
each other, and quite often are in competition with each other.
Despite all the diversity among the providers, the Internet-wide IP
connectivity is realized via Internet-wide distributed routing, which
involves multiple providers, and thus implies certain degree of
cooperation and coordination. Therefore, there is a need to balance
the providers' goals and objectives against the public interest of
Internet-wide connectivity and subscribers' choices. Further work is
needed to understand how to reach the balance.
Y. Rekhter,
Routing in a multi-provider Internet, [8]
As the underlying network becomes commoditized, many in the community begin to focus on higher layer issues, such as the facilities, information, and opportunities for collaboration available on the network. In this context, facilities include supercomputers and workstations, information includes world wide web and gopher servers, and opportunities for collaboration include e-mail and multi-user domains (MUDs). One could think of these three categories as corresponding to three types of communication: machine-to-machine, people-to-machine, and people-to-people.
Within each category, multiple dimensions emerge:
As we build this higher layer infrastructure taking the lower layers increasingly for granted, the need for statistics collection and analysis is not diminished. On the contrary, it is even more critical to maintain close track of traffic growth and behavior in order secure the integrity of the network. In this section we highlight several examples of the benefits of traffic characterization to the higher layers that end users care about.