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Characterizing residential broadband networks

Published: 24 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

A large and rapidly growing proportion of users connect to the Internet via residential broadband networks such as Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) and cable. Residential networks are often the bottleneck in the last mile of today's Internet. Their characteristics critically affect Internet applications, including voice-over-IP, online games, and peer-to-peer content sharing/delivery systems. However, to date, few studies have investigated commercial broadband deployments, and rigorous measurement data that characterize these networks at scale are lacking.
In this paper, we present the first large-scale measurement study of major cable and DSL providers in North America and Europe. We describe and evaluate the measurement tools we developed for this purpose. Our study characterizes several properties of broadband networks, including link capacities, packet round-trip times and jitter, packet loss rates, queue lengths, and queue drop policies. Our analysis reveals important ways in which residential networks differ from how the Internet is conventionally thought to operate. We also discuss the implications of our findings for many emerging protocols and systems, including delay-based congestion control (e.g., PCP) and network coordinate systems (e.g., Vivaldi).

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cover image ACM Conferences
IMC '07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
October 2007
390 pages
ISBN:9781595939081
DOI:10.1145/1298306
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 24 October 2007

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Author Tags

  1. broadband access networks
  2. cable
  3. dsl
  4. network measurement

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IMC07
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IMC07: Internet Measurement Conference
October 24 - 26, 2007
California, San Diego, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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