text: In this paper, we empirically demonstrate the growing importance of reliability by measuring its effect on user behavior. We present an approach for broadband reliability characterization using data collected by many emerging national initiatives to study broadband and apply it to the data gathered by the Federal Communications Commission's Measuring Broadband America project. Motivated by our findings, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a practical approach for improving the reliability of broadband Internet access with multihoming.
  @cite_26: 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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  @cite_55: In theory, multi homed Internet hosts, that is, hosts simultaneously connected to multiple Internet service providers (ISP) should see increased access capacity, be able to circumvent possible last-mile congestion problems, and experience improved end-to-end quality of service (QoS). In practice however, the advantages one can gain from multi homing are highly dependent on the path switching mechanism used, that is, on dynamically deciding which ISP should be used as a first-hop. This paper is a first step toward understanding the trade-off between performance improvements multi homing can help achieve and the complexity of the decisions that must be made. We measure changes in end-to-end network layer metrics (loss, latency, jitter) over the different paths available from a multi homed host to a large population of Internet hosts. Our measurements indicate that (1) in over 60 of the cases, one only needs to reevaluate the service provided by each ISP every minute to improve the performance of a specific metric, and that (2) in approximately 85 of the cases, decisions to switch from one ISP to another can be treated independently of the service metric of interest. We conclude that multi homing could in practice result in noticeable performance improvements.
  @cite_53: Evaluating and characterizing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is critical to subscribers shopping for alternative ISPs, companies providing reliable Internet services, and governments surveying the coverage of broadband services to its citizens. Ideally, ISP characterization should be done at scale, continuously, and from end users. While there has been significant progress toward this end, current approaches exhibit apparently unavoidable tradeoffs between coverage, continuous monitoring and capturing user-perceived performance. In this paper, we argue that network-intensive applications running on end systems avoid these tradeoffs, thereby offering an ideal platform for ISP characterization. Based on data collected from 500,000 peer-to-peer BitTorrent users across 3,150 networks, together with the reported results from the U.K. Ofcom SamKnows studies, we show the feasibility of this approach to characterize the service that subscribers can expect from a particular ISP. We discuss remaining research challenges and design requirements for a solution that enables efficient and accurate ISP characterization at an Internet scale.
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  @cite_63: In this paper we present Net alyzr, a network measurement and debugging service that evaluates the functionality provided by people's Internet connectivity. The design aims to prove both comprehensive in terms of the properties we measure and easy to employ and understand for users with little technical background. We structure Net alyzr as a signed Java applet (which users access via their Web browser) that communicates with a suite of measurement-specific servers. Traffic between the two then probes for a diverse set of network properties, including outbound port filtering, hidden in-network HTTP caches, DNS manipulations, NAT behavior, path MTU issues, IPv6 support, and access-modem buffer capacity. In addition to reporting results to the user, Net alyzr also forms the foundation for an extensive measurement of edge-network properties. To this end, along with describing Net alyzr 's architecture and system implementation, we present a detailed study of 130,000 measurement sessions that the service has recorded since we made it publicly available in June 2009.
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  @cite_66: Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) rely on the Domain Name System (DNS) for replica server selection. DNS-based server selection builds on the assumption that, in the absence of information about the client's actual network location, the location of a client's DNS resolver provides a good approximation. The recent growth of remote DNS services breaks this assumption and can negatively impact client's web performance. In this paper, we assess the end-to-end impact of using remote DNS services on CDN performance and present the first evaluation of an industry-proposed solution to the problem. We find that remote DNSusage can indeed significantly impact client's web performance and that the proposed solution, if available, can effectively address the problem for most clients. Considering the performance cost of remote DNS usage and the limited adoption base of the industry-proposed solution, we present and evaluate an alternative approach, Direct Resolution, to readily obtain comparable performance improvements without requiring CDN or DNS participation.
summary: Previous work on broadband networks has often focused on characterizing services in terms of performance (e.g., link capacity and latency) from a range of platforms and vantage points, including customized home gateways @cite_55 @cite_45 , applications in end-user devices @cite_53 @cite_57 @cite_40 @cite_2 , Web-based tests @cite_63 @cite_7 @cite_28 , and well-provisioned measurement nodes outside the access networks @cite_26 . We use longitudinal data collected by two of these efforts, the FCC's MBA initiative and Namehelp @cite_66 , to study broadband reliability.