I neglected to say one additional thing which I think may be worth reading before replying. I have always held the opinion that internet traffic isn't internet traffic until it hits the Internet, which I defined as two or more autonomous systems functioning on their own but possessing the ability to relay information between the two. I'm pretty sure that if you have a single network, you couldn't label it "inter" unless "inter" was between yourself - and then you have a network.. Not an internetwork. Maybe?? :) On 8/15/13 1:10 PM, "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
On Aug 15, 2013, at 1:27 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net> wrote:
My laptop at home is an edge node under the definition above, despite being behind a NAT. My home NAS is as well. When I back up my laptop to my NAS over my home network, that traffic would be counted as "Internet" traffic by your definition.
I have a feeling that does not come close to matching the mental model most people have in their head of "Internet traffic". But maybe I'm confused.
It matches my mental model. Your network is connected to the Internet, that's traffic between two hosts, it's Internet traffic.
Let's take the same two machines, but I own one and you own one, and let's put them on the same network behind a NAT just like your home, but at a coffee shop. Rather than backups we're both running bit torrent and our two machines exchange data.
That's Internet traffic, isn't it? Two unrelated people talking over the network? They just happen to be on the same LAN.
My definition was arbitrary, so feel free to argue another arbitrary definition is more useful in some way, but for my arbitrary definition you've applied the rules correct, and I would argue it's the right way to think about things. In a broad english sense "IP packets traversing an Internet connected network are Internet traffic".
It's all graph cross sections. "Peering" volume totals a set of particular links in the graph, omitting traffic from your laptop to your file server, or your NAS to your laptop. My model attempts to isolate every edge on the graph, and generate the total sum of IP traffic crossing any Internet connected network, which would always include all forms of local caches (Akamai, Google, Netflix) and even your NAT. I think that's a more interesting number, and a number that's easier to count and defend than say a peering or "backbone" number.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/