Long-Term Forecasting of Internet Traffic for Pakistan Internet Exchange

Abstract

The paper makes future predictions of the Internet traffic demand by applying statistical techniques on data collected between two nodes of Pakistan's Internet backbone over a period of two years. The predictions simplify die task of capacity planning for the network management by helping them determine when and to what extent future provisioning is required in the backbone. This is not easy as quantified information is missing about the rate of increase and the pattern followed by the Internet traffic demand. We have used various statistical analysis methods on aggregate Internet demand between two nodes to isolate the long term trend from the noisy short term fluctuations in the overall traffic pattern, ensure its variance is within control limits and finally make a model out of it to make predictions for future. The reliability of the future predictions given by our proposed model is proved empirically by the fact that the estimates of the future values deviate by only 7% from the actual values observed during that time.