Characterization of Traffic Flows in a Low-Resource Community Wireless Network

Ackerson, Emmanuel and Chavula, Josiah (2025) Characterization of Traffic Flows in a Low-Resource Community Wireless Network, Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Networks, Communication and Computing (ICNCC 2025), 10-12 December 2025, Fukuoka, Japan, IEEE.

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Abstract

Community Wireless Networks (CWNs) play a pivotal role in bridging the digital divide between urban and underserved areas, forming a crucial component of local socio-economic infrastructure. However, the unique architecture of these networks hinders their ability to adjust to growing technological advancements. While traffic analysis is essential for uncovering underlying network dynamics and facilitating performance optimization, most current research tends to focus on conventional networks, leaving CWNs understudied. This study presents a statistical analysis of traffic dynamics in a low-resource CWN, leveraging flow-level metrics to characterize the network behaviour. We classified traffic into eight distinct application categories, including Web Services, Video Streaming, and P2P File Transfer, and analyzed flow-level metrics such as unique application counts, flow volume, packet count, and byte size across multiple time scales. The findings reveal significant heterogeneity, with both application type and time shaping the network usage. Temporal analysis shows distinct weekday-weekend patterns, with business-oriented applications peaking during work hours. This investigation underscores the need for time-aware traffic management and QoS in resource-constrained networks, while providing a foundation for targeted policy design, intelligent monitoring, security and scalable infrastructure planning.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Subjects:	Networks > Network algorithms > Control path algorithms > Network design and planning algorithms Networks > Network services > Network monitoring Networks > Network performance evaluation > Network measurement
Date Deposited:	23 Jun 2026 12:05
Last Modified:	23 Jun 2026 12:05
URI:	https://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1785

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