Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Towards a Holistic Net Neutrality Violation Detection System: A Case Study of Slovenia

  • Published:
Journal of Network and Systems Management Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Democratic principles, from the freedom of speech, to fair business practices, rely on Net neutrality, i.e. equal access to communication infrastructure and services. While a number of national and international regulations stipulate Net neutrality, the actual enforcement is challenging as regulators have to collect and analyze a large amount of network measurements, and pinpoint cases of neutrality violations. Through a large-scale distributed crowdsourced measurements campaign, the Agency for Communication Networks and Services of the Republic of Slovenia (AKOS) has acquired a massive dataset of Internet performance measurements in Slovenia. In this work we analyze about one million multi-dimensional data records gathered by the AKOS Test Net measurement system and identify the practices, such as port blocking, that might violate Net neutrality principles. We then chart the limitations of the employed measurement approach and propose a holistic multi-stakeholder approach ensuring high quality measurement data upon which reliable Net neutrality violation inferences should be based.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. https://breitbandmessung.de/.

  2. Garrett et al. provide a comprehensive summary of issues in their recent survey of traffic differentiation detection [16].

  3. https://www.akostest.net/en.

  4. Each measurement session always includes speed test results. Other measurement types may or may not be executed depending on the application type (e.g. only the Android-based application supports TCP/UDP port availability test), client’s permission (e.g. NDT tests need to be explicitly enabled), and sensor availability (e.g. GPS coordinates available or not).

  5. https://github.com/vpejovic/netnevt.

  6. https://github.com/ivek1312/ricercando.

  7. While technically differentiation between users of two different ISPs does not necessarily amount to Net neutrality violation, we begin our analysis with this problem as it represents the easiest case—failing to detect differentiation at the ISP level indicates that differentiation on deeper levels of the hierarchy is unlikely to be detected either.

  8. https://www.measurementlab.net/tests/ndt/.

  9. https://breitbandmessung.de/.

  10. https://respectmynet.eu/.

  11. An example of drive test software is Rohde & Schwartz ROMES4 https://www.livingston-products.com/products/pdf/156521_1_en.pdf.

References

  1. Waverman, L., Meschi, M., Fuss, M.: The impact of telecoms on economic growth in developing countries. Vodafone policy Pap. Ser. 2(03), 10–24 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Manyika, J., Roxburgh, C.: The great transformer: The impact of the Internet on economic growth and prosperity. McKinsey Glob. Inst. 1, (2011)

  3. Gubbi, J., Buyya, R., Marusic, S., Palaniswami, M.: Internet of Things (IoT): a vision, architectural elements, and future directions. Futur. Gener. Comput. Syst. 29(7), 1645–1660 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Hart, J.A.: The net neutrality debate in the United States. J. Inf. Technol. Polit. 8(4), 418–443 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Ganley, P., Allgrove, B.: Net neutrality: a user’s guide. Comput. Law Secur. Rev. 22(6), 454–463 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Allen, J., Daly, J. A., Marcus, S., de Antonio Monte, D., Woolfson, R.: Study on net-neutrality regulation. (2017)

  7. Leiner, B.M., et al.: A brief history of the Internet. ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 39(5), 22–31 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Crowcroft, J.: Net neutrality: the technical side of the debate: a white paper. ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 37(1), 49–56 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Wu, T.: Network neutrality, broadband discrimination. J. Telecomm. High Tech. L. 2, 141 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  10. European Commission: Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 of the European Parliament and of the Council. Off. J. Eur. Union L 310/1, (2015)

  11. BEREC: BEREC Guidelines on the Implementation by National Regulators of European Net Neutrality Rules. (2016)

  12. Weber, M., Svedek, Jukic, V. Z., Golub, I., Zuljevic, T.: Can HAKOMetar be used to increase transparency in the context of network neutrality? In: 2013 12th International Conference on Telecommunications (ConTEL), pp. 309–316. (2013)

  13. Ofcom: UK broadband speeds—the performance of fixed-line broadband delivered to UK residential consumers. (2010)

  14. Miorandi, D., Carreras, I., Gregori, E., Graham, I., Stewart, J.: Measuring net neutrality in mobile Internet: towards a crowdsensing-based citizen observatory. In: 2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC), pp. 199–203. (2013)

  15. Bustos-Jiménez, J., Fuenzalida, C.: All packets are equal, but some are more equal than others. In: Proceedings of the Latin America Networking Conference on LANC 2014, p. 5. (2014)

  16. Garrett, T., Setenareski, L.E., Peres, L.M., Bona, L.C.E., Duarte, E.P.: Monitoring network neutrality: a survey on traffic differentiation detection. IEEE Commun. Surv, Tutorials (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Dischinger, M., Marcon, M., Guha, S., Gummadi, P. K., Mahajan, R., Saroiu, S.: Glasnost: enabling end users to detect traffic differentiation. In: NSDI, pp. 405–418 (2010)

  18. Gregori, E., Luconi, V., Vecchio, A.: NeutMon: studying neutrality in european mobile networks. In: IEEE INFOCOM 2018-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS). pp. 523–528. (2018)

  19. Gregori, E., Luconi, V., Vecchio, A.: Studying forwarding differences in european mobile broadband with a net neutrality perspective. In: European Wireless 2018; 24th European Wireless Conference, pp. 1–7. (2018)

  20. Zhang, Y., Mao, Z. M., Zhang, M.: Detecting traffic differentiation in backbone ISPs with NetPolice. In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, pp. 103–115. (2009)

  21. Kanuparthy, P., Dovrolis, C.: Diffprobe: detecting ISP service discrimination. In: 2010 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM, , pp. 1–9. (2010)

  22. Lu, G., Chen, Y., Birrer, S., Bustamante, F.E., Li, X.: POPI: a user-level tool for inferring router packet forwarding priority. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 18(1), 1–14 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Weinsberg, U., Soule, A., Massoulie, L.: Inferring traffic shaping and policy parameters using end host measurements. In: 2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM, pp. 151–155. (2011)

  24. Ravaioli, R., Barakat, C., Urvoy-Keller, G.: Chkdiff: checking traffic differentiation at internet access. In: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on CoNEXT Student Workshop, pp. 57–58. (2012).

  25. Bin Tariq, M., Motiwala, M., Feamster, N., Ammar, M.: Detecting network neutrality violations with causal inference. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, pp. 289–300. (2009)

  26. Choffnes, D., Gill, P., Mislove, A.: An empirical evaluation of deployed dpi middleboxes and their implications for policymakers. In: Proc. of TPRC, (2017)

  27. Molavi Kakhki, A., et al.: Identifying traffic differentiation in mobile networks. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 239–251. (2015)

  28. Goel, U., Steiner, M., Wittie, M. P., Flack, M., Ludin, S.: Detecting cellular middleboxes using passive measurement techniques. In: International Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement, pp. 95–107. (2016)

  29. Schaurich, V. G., de Carvalho, M. B., Granville, L. Z.: ISPANN: A policy-based ISP auditor for network neutrality violation detection. In: 2018 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), pp. 1081–1088. (2018)

  30. Specure: SPECURE NetTest—overview of the technical setup, data collection methodology and reporting capabilities. (2015)

  31. Pejovic, V., Majhen, I., Janez, M., Zupan, B.: RICERCANDO: data mining toolkit for mobile broadband measurements. Comput. Netw. 17, 107294 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Ricciato, F.: Traffic monitoring and analysis for the optimization of a 3G network. IEEE Wirel. Commun. 13(6), 42–49 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Demšar, J., et al.: Orange: data mining toolbox in Python. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 14(1), 2349–2353 (2013)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  34. Raida, V., Svoboda, P., Rupp, M.: Lightweight detection of tariff limits in cellular mobile networks. In 2018 IEEE 29th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), pp. 1–7. (2018)

  35. Dischinger, M., Mislove, A., Haeberlen, A., Gummadi, K. P.: Detecting bittorrent blocking. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement, pp. 3–8. (2008)

  36. Ravaioli, R.: Active inference of network neutrality. Université Nice Sophia Antipolis. (2016)

  37. Bifet, A., Gavalda, R.: Learning from time-changing data with adaptive windowing. In: Proceedings of the 2007 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, pp. 443–448. (2007)

  38. Meinshausen, N.: Quantile Regression Forests. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 7, 983–999 (2006)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ivan Majhen and Miha Janež for their help with the data analysis, Janez Sterle for discussions about AKOS Test Net system and result interpretation, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez for discussions about Net neutrality violation detection, and Urban Kunc for his help with the interaction with the measurement system. The work was partly funded by the Agency for Communication Networks and Services of the Republic of Slovenia (AKOS) and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme underGrant Agreement No. 644399 (MONROE) through the open call project RICERCANDO. The views expressed are solely those of the author.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Večna Pot 113, 1000, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Veljko Pejović

Authors
  1. Veljko Pejović
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Veljko Pejović.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Pejović, V. Towards a Holistic Net Neutrality Violation Detection System: A Case Study of Slovenia. J Netw Syst Manage 28, 1453–1481 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-020-09546-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-020-09546-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation