Crowdsourcing ISP Characterization to the Network Edge
Zachary S. Bischof, John S. Otto, Mario A. Sánchez, John P. Rula, David R. Choffnes, and Fabián E. Bustamante.
In Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Measurements Up the STack (W-MUST), August 2011.
EECS Department
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60201, USA
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Abstract
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.
