| Internet-Draft | IAB COVID-19 Network Impacts Workshop 2020 | January 2021 |
| Arkko, et al. | Expires 10 July 2021 | [Page] |
The COVID-19 pandemic caused changes in Internet traffic, particularly during the introduction of the initial quarantine and work-from-home arrangements.¶
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) held a work to discuss Network Impacts of the pandemic, on November 9-13, 2020. The meeting was held online given the on-going travel and contact restrictions at that time.¶
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶
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The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) held a workshop to discuss Network Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, on November 9-13, 2020. The meeting was held online given the on-going travel and contact restrictions at that time.¶
COVID-19 has caused changes in Internet traffic. These changes appeared rather abruptly, in particular during the introduction of the initial quarantine and work-from-home arrangements. The changes relate to traffic volumes, location of traffic, as well as the types of traffic and applications used.¶
Announcement for the workshop was sent out in July 2020, requesting interested parties to submit position papers for the workshop program committee. A total of 15 position papers were received from altogether 33 authors. The papers are listed in Section 4. In addition, several other types of contributions and pointers to existing work were provided. A number of position papers referred to parallel work being published in measurement-related academic conferences.¶
Invitations for the workshop were sent out based on the position papers and other expressions of interest. On the workshop conference calls were 45 participants, listed in Section 5.¶
The workshop was held over one week hosting three sessions covering measuremnets and observations, operational issue, and final future consideration and conclusions. As these three session were scheduled Monday, Wednesday, and Friday a positive side effect was that the time in between could be used foor mailing list discusion and compilation of additional workshop material.¶
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact on people's lives and the societies and economies around the globe. But it also had big impact on networking. With large numbers of people working from home or otherwise depending on the network for their daily lives, network traffic has surged. Internet service providers and operators have reported 20% traffic growth or more in a matter of weeks. Traffic in Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) is similarly on the rise. Most forms of network traffic have seen an increase, with conversational multimedia traffic growing in some cases more than 200%. And user time spent on conferencing services has risen by an order of magnitude on some conferencing platforms.¶
In general, the Internet has coped relatively well with this traffic growth, albeit not without some issues. For instance, some outages, video quality reduction, and other issues were reported. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how the technology, operators and service providers have been able to respond to large changes in traffic patterns.¶
Understanding what actually happened with Internet traffic is of course interesting by its own right. How that impacted user experience, or the intended function of the services is equally interesting. Measurements and reports of traffic situation from 2020 are therefore valuable. But it would also be interesting to understand what types of network management and capacity expansion actions were taken in general. Anecdotal evidence points to Internet and service providers tracking how their services are used, and in many cases adjusting services to accommodate the new traffic patterns, from dynamic allocation of compute resources to more complex changes.¶
The impacts of this crisis are also a potential opportunity to understand the impact of traffic shifts and growth more generally, or to prepare for future situations -- crisis or otherwise - that impact networking. Or even allow us to adjust the technology to be even better suited to respond to changes.¶
The workshop was held to convene interested researchers, network operators, and network management experts, and Internet technologists to share their experiences. The scope included:¶
The workshop started with a focus on measurements. A larger portion of the submitted papers presented and discussed measurement data and these submissions provided a good basis get a better understanding of the situation, covering different angles and aspects of network traffic and kind of networks.¶
Based on the measuremenst data of one ISP, three IXPs, a metropolitan educational network, and a mobile operator it was observed at the beginning of the workshop that overall the network was able to handle the situation well despite an significant increase in traffic growth rate in March/April.¶
Changes in the traffic patterns: Traffic in mobile network decreased and traffic from home network increased. Strong increase in video conferencing (incl remote schooling)¶
TBD...¶
TBD...¶
Network load noticeably increased but most operators reacted quickly by adding new capacity (earlier?)¶
Last mile congestion/higher latency on legacy network (PPPoE)¶
The type of traffic needed by the users also changed in 2020. Upstream traffic increased due the use of video conferences, remote schooling, and similar applications. The NCTA and Comcast reported that while downstream traffic grew 20%, upstream traffic grew as much as 30% to 37% [NCTA2020] [Comcast2020]. Vodafone reported that upstream traffic grew 100% in some markets [Vodafone2020].¶
Ericsson's Consumer Lab surveyed users for their usage and experiences during the crisis). Some of the key findings in [ConsumerlabReport2020] were:¶
Some of the behaviours are likely permanent changes [ConsumerlabReport2020]. The adoption of video calls and other new services by many consumers, such as the older generation, is likely going to have a long-lasting effect. Surveys in various organizations point to a likely long-term increase in the number of people interested in remote work [WorkplaceAnalytics2020] [McKinsey2020].¶
There is a wealth of data about the performance of the Internet during the criss. The main conclusion from the various measurements is that fairly large shifts occurred. And those shifts were not merely about changing one application for another, they actually impacted traffic flows and directions, and caused in many cases a significant traffic increase. Early reports also seem to indicate that the shifts have went relatively smoothly from the point of view overall consumer experience.¶
An important but not so visible factor that lead to this was that many people and organizations where highly motivated to ensure good experience. A lot of collaboration happened in the background, problems were corrected, many providers significantly increased their capacity, and so on.¶
In general, the Internet also seems inherently well suited for adapting to a new situation, at least within some bounds. The Internet is designed for any application and situation, rather than optimized for today's particular traffic. This makes it possible to use it for many applications, in many deployment situations, and make changes as needed. The generality is present in many parts of the overall system, from basic Internet technology to browsers, from name servers to content delivery networks and cloud platforms. When needs change, what is needed is often merely different services, perhaps some re-allocation of resources, but not fundamental technology or hardware changes.¶
On the other hand, this is not to say that no improvements are needed:¶
The following position papers were received, in alphabetical order:¶
The following is an alphabetical list of participants in the workshop.¶
The workshop Program Committee members were Jari Arkko, Stephen Farrell, Cullen Jennings, Colin Perkins, Ben Campbell, and Mirja Kuehlewind.¶
The authors would like to thank the workshop participants, the members of the IAB, the program committee, the participants in the architecture discussion list for interesting discussions, and Cindy Morgan for the practical arrangements.¶