Campus Traffic and e-Learning during COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the adoption of severe measures to counteract the spread of the infection. Social distancing and lockdown measures modified people’s habits, while the Internet gained a major role in supporting remote working, e-teaching, online collaboration, gaming, video streaming, etc. All these sudden changes put unprecedented stress on the network. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the lockdown enforcement on the Politecnico di Torino campus network. Right after the school shutdown on the 25th of February, PoliTO deployed its own in-house solution for virtual teaching. Ever since, the university provides about 600 virtual classes daily, serving more than 16 000 students per day. Here, we report a picture of how the pandemic changed PoliTO’s network traffic. We first focus on the usage of remote working and collaboration platforms. Given the peculiarity of PoliTO online teaching solution that is hosted in-house, we drill down on the traffic, characterizing both the audience and the network footprint. Overall, we present a snapshot of the abrupt changes seen on campus traffic due to COVID-19, and testify how the Internet has proved robust to successfully cope with challenges while maintaining the university operations.