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.
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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).
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30505-9_9
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