Towards understanding developing world traffic

Abstract

While many projects aim to provide network access to the developing world or improve existing network access, relatively little data exists regarding the behavior of traffic in these environments, especially in regards to the characteristics of traffic in the developing world. In this paper, we provide a first glimpse into the traffic gathered by a worldwide proxy network, and try to observe differences in first-world and developing-world traffic characteristics. What sets this work apart from similar research is the scope and level of detail -- we capture more than 3TB of content representing one week's browsing by 348K users across 190 countries. Capturing the content, rather than just access logs, also allows us to perform similarity analysis at the content level.