Abstract
As home networks see increasingly faster downstream throughput speeds, a natural question is whether users are benefiting from these faster speeds or simply facing performance bottlenecks in their own home networks. In this paper, we ask whether downstream throughput bottlenecks occur more frequently in their home networks or in their access ISPs. We identify lightweight metrics that can accurately identify whether a throughput bottleneck lies inside or outside a user’s home network and develop a detection algorithm that locates these bottlenecks. We validate this algorithm in controlled settings and report on two deployments, one of which included 2,652 homes across the United States. We find that wireless bottlenecks are more common than access-link bottlenecks—particularly for home networks with downstream throughput greater than 20 Mbps, where access-link bottlenecks are relatively rare.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adya, A., Bahl, P., Chandra, R., Qiu, L.: Architecture and techniques for diagnosing faults in IEEE 802.11 infrastructure networks. In: MobiCom, pp. 30–44, Philadelphia, PA (2004)
Ahmed, N., Ismail, U., Keshav, S., Papagiannaki, K.: Online estimation of RF interference. In: ACM CoNEXT, Madrid, Spain, December 2008
Biaz, S., Vaidya, N.H.: Discriminating congestion losses from wireless losses using inter-arrival times at the receiver. In: IEEE Symposium on Application - Specific Systems and Software Engineering and Technology (ASSET), Washington, DC, USA (1999)
Canadi, I., Barford, P., Sommers, J.: Revisiting broadband performance. In: ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), October 2012
Cheng, Y., Bellardo, J., Benko, P., Snoeren, A.C., Voelker, G.M., Savage, S.: Jigsaw: solving the puzzle of enterprise 802.11 analysis. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Pisa, Italy, August 2006
Cheng, Y.C., Afanasyev, M., Verkaik, P., Benkö, P., Chiang, J., Snoeren, A.C., Savage, S., Voelker, G.M.: Automating cross-layer diagnosis of enterprise wireless networks. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 37(4), 25–36 (2007)
Cioccio, L.D., Teixeira, R., Rosenberg, C.: Measuring home networks with HomeNet profiler. In: Roughan, M., Chang, R. (eds.) PAM 2013. LNCS, vol. 7799, pp. 176–186. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Croce, D., En-Najjary, T., Urvoy-Keller, G., Biersack, E.: Capacity estimation of ADSL links. In: Proceedings of CoNEXT, December 2008
Dischinger, M., Haeberlen, A., Gummadi, K.P., Saroiu, S.: Characterizing residential broadband networks. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, San Diego, CA, USA, October 2007
Kanuparthy, P., Dovrolis, C., Papagiannaki, K., Seshan, S., Steenkiste, P.: Can user-level probing detect and diagnose common home-WLAN pathologies. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 42(1), 7–15 (2012)
Katabi, D., Blake, C.: Inferring congestion sharing and path characteristics from packet interarrival times. Technical report MIT-LCS-TR-828, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2002)
Kim, K.H., Nam, H., Schulzrinne, H.: WiSlow: a Wi-Fi network performance troubleshooting tool for end users. In: IEEE INFOCOM, pp. 862–870 (2014)
Lakshminarayanan, K., Sapra, S., Seshan, S., Steenkiste, P.: RFdump: an architecture for monitoring the wireless ether. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, CoNEXT 2009, pp. 253–264 (2009)
Mahajan, R., Rodrig, M., Wetherall, D., Zahorjan, J.: Analyzing the mac-level behavior of wireless networks in the wild. In: SIGCOMM 2006, pp. 75–86 (2006)
Niculescu, D.: Interference map for 802.11 networks. In: ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 339–350, San Diego, California, USA, October 2007
Rayanchu, S., Mishra, A., Agrawal, D., Saha, S., Banerjee, S.: Diagnosing wireless packet losses in 802.11: separating collision from weak signal. In: INFOCOM 2008, The 27th Conference on Computer Communications, April 2008, pp. 735–743. IEEE (2008)
Rayanchu, S., Patro, A., Banerjee, S.: Catching whales and minnows using WiFiNet: deconstructing non-WiFi interference using wifi hardware. In: USENIX NSDI, San Jose, CA
Rayanchu, S., Patro, A., Banerjee, S.: Airshark: detecting non-WiFi RF devices using commodity wifi hardware. In: ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 137–154, Berlin, Germany (2011)
Sánchez, M.A., Otto, J.S., Bischof, Z.S., Bustamante, F.E.: Trying broadband characterization at home. In: Roughan, M., Chang, R. (eds.) PAM 2013. LNCS, vol. 7799, pp. 198–207. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Sundaresan, S., de Donato, W., Feamster, N., Teixeira, R., Crawford, S., Pescapè, A.: Broadband internet performance: a view from the gateway. In: ACM SIGCOMM, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 2011
tcptrace: A TCP connection analysis tool. http://irg.cs.ohiou.edu/software/tcptrace/
Zhang, Y., Breslau, L., Paxson, V., Shenker, S.: On the characteristics and origins of internet flow rates. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Pittsburgh, PA, August 2002
Acknowledgments
We thank the FCC and SamKnows for helping us develop and deploy HoA in the Measuring Broadband America (MBA) platform. We also acknowledge the participants of the MBA platform. We would like to thank our shepherd, Mahesh K. Marina, and the reviewers for their helpful comments. This work was supported by NSF awards CNS-1535796, CNS-1539906, and CNS-1213157, and the European Communitys Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) no. 611001 (User-Centric Networking).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sundaresan, S., Feamster, N., Teixeira, R. (2016). Home Network or Access Link? Locating Last-Mile Downstream Throughput Bottlenecks. In: Karagiannis, T., Dimitropoulos, X. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9631. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30505-9_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30505-9_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30504-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30505-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)