Internet traffic

Internet traffic is the flow of data across the Internet.

Because of the distributed nature of the Internet, there is no single point of measurement for total Internet traffic. Internet traffic data from public peering points can give an indication of Internet volume and growth, but these figures exclude traffic that remains within a single service provider's network as well as traffic that crosses private peering points.

The phrase "Internet traffic" is sometimes used to describe web traffic, the amount of data sent and received by visitors of a particular web site.

File sharing constitutes a large fraction of Internet traffic. The prevalent technology for file sharing is the BitTorrent protocol, which is a peer-to-peer (P2P) system mediated through indexing sites that provide resource directories. The traffic patterns of P2P systems are often described as problematic and causing congestion. According to a Sandvine Research in 2013, Bit Torrent’s share of Internet traffic decreased by 20% to 7.4% overall, reduced from 31% in 2008.

Streaming media provides users with video and audio resources, such as YouTube and Spotify.

The Internet does not employ any formally centralized facilities for traffic management. Its progenitor networks, especially the ARPANET established early backbone infrastructure which carried traffic between major interchange centers for traffic, resulting in a tiered, hierarchical system of internet service providers (ISPs) within which the tier 1 networks provided traffic exchange through settlement-free peering and routing of traffic to lower-level tiers of ISPs. The dynamic growth of the worldwide network resulted in ever-increasing interconnections at all peering levels of the Internet, so that a robust system developed that could mediate link failures, bottlenecks, and other congestion at many levels.

Economic traffic management (ETM) is the term that is sometimes used to point out the opportunities for seeding as a practice that caters contribution within peer-to-peer file sharing and the distribution of content in the digital world in general.

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