The Internet, the world's largest and most pervasive network, lacks a transparent, granular view of its traffic patterns, volumes, and growth trends, hindering the networking community's understanding of its dynamics. This paper leverages publicly available Internet Exchange Point traffic statistics to address this gap, presenting a comprehensive two-year study (2023-2024) from 472 IXPs worldwide, capturing approximately 300 Tbps of peak daily aggregate traffic by late 2024. Our analysis reveals a 49.2% global traffic increase (24.5% annualized), uncovers regionally distinct diurnal patterns and event-driven anomalies, and demonstrates stable utilization rates, reflecting predictable infrastructure scaling. By analyzing biases and confirming high self-similarity, we establish IXP traffic as a robust proxy for overall Internet growth and usage behavior. With transparent, replicable data--covering 87% of the worldwide IXP port capacity--and plans to release our dataset, this study offers a verifiable foundation for long-term Internet traffic monitoring. In particular, our findings shed light on the interplay between network design and function, providing an accessible framework for researchers and operators to explore the Internet's evolving ecosystem.

翻译：互联网作为全球最大且最普及的网络，其流量模式、规模及增长趋势缺乏透明且细粒度的视图，这阻碍了网络领域对其动态特性的理解。本文利用可公开获取的互联网交换中心流量统计来弥补这一空白，呈现了一项基于全球472个IXP的两年期综合研究（2023-2024年），截至2024年底，已捕获约300 Tbps的日峰值聚合流量。我们的分析揭示了49.2%的全球流量增长（年化24.5%），发现了具有区域特征的日内模式及事件驱动的异常现象，并证明了稳定的利用率，这反映了可预测的基础设施扩展。通过分析偏差并确认高度自相似性，我们将IXP流量确立为整体互联网增长与使用行为的稳健代理指标。凭借覆盖全球IXP端口容量87%的透明且可复现数据，以及发布数据集的计划，本研究为长期互联网流量监测提供了可验证的基础。尤其值得注意的是，我们的发现阐明了网络设计与功能之间的相互作用，为研究人员和运营商探索不断演进的互联网生态系统提供了易于理解的框架。