Title: An Empirical Study of Campus-Level Instagram Traffic
Time: 13:00
Location: Meeting Room B, Building Zeta
Speaker: Carey Lee Williamson
Abstract: Instagram is a popular network application for photo sharing, video streaming, and online social media interaction. This talk presents results from an empirical study of Instagram network traffic, as viewed from a large campus edge network. Despite the challenges of NAT, DHCP, end-to-end encryption, and high traffic volume, we are able to identify key characteristics of Instagram traffic, which exceeds 1 TB per day. The main highlights from our study include classic observations such as diurnal usage patterns, Zipf-like distributions for IP frequency-rank profile, and heavy-tailed transfer size distributions. Several new observations include anomalous spikes in Instagram traffic, some network policies that inhibit Instagram usage, and some small differences in Instagram usage between campus-based users and the general public.