2 F. Author et al.

provide every student with a computer and ensure Internet access at every school.
In this context, Plan Ceibal has been a pioneer, starting in 2007 and being the
only one so far with a national scope. It provides technological support to the na-
tional K-12 education system, including Wi-Fi connectivity and videoconference
infrastructure for all public schools, as well as access to educational platforms
(e.g. a digital library, a learning management system and an intelligent tutoring
system for math).
In the educational context it is also imperative to analyze the network us-
age evolution in order to predict future needs and update the infrastructure
accordingly [?]. To this purpose, we focus on user behavior characterization. We
present a general methodology to identify the different network usage profiles,
based on the individuals’ traffic dynamics. We seek to identify the users with
similar behavior, both in terms of temporal patterns and traffic volume. For this
purpose, specific features were defined and validated, ending up in a multi-stage
clustering method to determine the main user profiles.
To the best of our knowledge, this work stands out from the previous as
the first of its kind in a K-12 scenario, providing a general method to answer
questions such as: How many relevant types of users exist in this context? Are
they correlated with the school level, location or sociocultural context? How
long are they connected to the network and at what times? Which applications
are the most relevant for each type of user (e.g., social networks, educational
applications, etc)? What is the impact of BYOD6 ? In addition, the evolution of
the users’ behavior throughout the school year was studied by comparing the
clustering results obtained with two datasets, corresponding to the beginning
and the end of the year. The results indicate that the main four user profiles
identified were the same at both time periods. This is a remarkable result, as it
enables the user profile characterization from data collected at the beginning of
the school year and then tracking the individuals’ evolution during the rest of
the year. The insights found are useful from a network operator perspective, but
also provide very valuable information for the ESP management and learning
analytics purposes. The ultimate goal of an ESP is to have a significant impact
on the education system performance, so this information may also support
other studies concerning the appropriation levels and the academic improvements
achieved.

2 Previous Work
Different goals motivate diverse approaches to network traffic characterization
and description. On the one hand, we find more descriptive approaches, which
provide a deep view of the network operation through data exploratory analyses
with several empirical distributions from diverse network measurements [?,?,?].
On the other hand, we find the approaches particularly focused on finding user
6
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): Acronym which refers to the policy of allow-
ing students or employees to bring personally owned devices (laptops, tablets, and
smartphones) to their school or workplace.