Forecasting and Event Detection in Internet Resource Dynamics using Time Series Models

TL;DR

This paper uses time series models, specifically ARIMA, to forecast and analyze the long-term growth and significant events in Internet infrastructure, focusing on Autonomous System resource data from five countries.

Contribution

It introduces a time series modeling approach to forecast AS growth and detect significant events, with validation across multiple countries and insights into growth drivers.

Findings

India shows the fastest growth and wider Internet reachability.

Significant level changes correlate with GDP growth periods.

ARIMA models effectively forecast AS growth with 95% confidence intervals.

Abstract

At present Internet has emerged as a country's predominant and viable data communication infrastructure. The Autonomous System (AS) resources which are building blocks of the Internet are AS numbers, IPv4 and IPv6 Prefixes. AS number growth is one of Internet infrastructure development indicators. Hence understanding on long term trend and stochastic variation behaviour are essential to detect significant events during the growth. In this work, time series based approximation is considered for mathematical modelling and forecast the yearly AS growth. The AS data of five countries namely India, China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are extracted from APNIC archive. ARIMA models with different Auto Regressive and Moving Average parameters are identified for forecasting. Model validation, parameter estimation, point forecast and prediction intervals with 95 % confidence levels for the five countries are reported in the paper. The significant level change in variations, positive growth percentage in Inter Annual Absolute Variations (IAAV) and higher percentage of advertised ASes when compared to other countries indicate India's fast growth and wider global reachability of Internet infrastructure from 2007 onwards. The correlation between IAAV change point and GDP growth period indicates that service sector industry growth is the driving force behind significant yearly changes.