To many in the developed world, the Internet is always accessible from any computer or mobile device at any time of the day.
A study by researchers from the University of Southern California (USC), however, shows that in some parts of the world, the Internet has a regular sleep pattern.
According to the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the Internet "is a beast made of over 4 billion IP addresses on a vast interconnected network," and it sleeps in different parts of the world following similar cycles as the sun rises and sets.
In the U.S. and Western Europe, the public Internet is mostly active 24/7 because, even as individuals put their personal computers to sleep or shut them off, they keep their Internet routers on non-stop.
In Asia, India, Eastern Europe and South America, people access their Internet through different methods depending on the time of day, so IP addresses are turned off or go to sleep at certain times of the day.
The team behind the project was led by John Heidemann, a research professor who said that the study was meant to establish a baseline to see how active the Internet is in order to spot problems in the system more quickly and see just how resilient it is as a whole.
"The Internet is important in our lives and businesses, from streaming movies to buying online. Measuring network outages is a first step to improving Internet reliability," he said.
Researchers were able to determine the sleep cycle of the Internet and get a sense of just how active it is around the world, by pinging 3.7 million IP address blocks every 11 minutes for two months. That's around one billion unique IP addresses monitored to know when they were on or off.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in order to better understand the activity patterns of the Internet and determine the difference between a sleeping Internet and an Internet outage due to disaster, such as the one that hit New York when it was struck by Hurricane Sandy.
The findings of Heidemann and his team will be presented at the 2014 ACM Internet Measurements Conference next month in Vancouver, Canada.
