Internet usage at elementary, middle and high schools: A first look at K-12 traffic from two US Georgia counties

Abstract

Earlier Internet traffic analysis studies have focused on enterprises [1,6], backbone networks [2,3], universities [5,7], or residential traffic [4]. However, much less is known about Internet usage in the K-12 educational system (elementary, middle and high schools). In this paper, we present a first analysis of network traffic captured at two K-12 districts in the US state of Georgia, also comparing with similar traces collected at our university (Georgia Tech). An interesting point is that one of the two K-12 counties has limited Internet access capacity and it is congested during most of the workday. Further, both K-12 networks are heavily firewalled, using both port-based and content-based filters. The paper focuses on the host activity, utilization trends, user activity, application mix, flow characteristics and communication dispersion in these two K-12 networks.