[ NNSquad ] Characterizing broadband networks without client software

[Wes Felter <wesley@felter.org>]

This paper appeared in this year's Internet Measurement Conference:

Marcel Dischinger, Andreas Haeberlen, Krishna P. Gummadi, Stefan  
Saroiu: Characterizing Residential Broadband Networks. 
http://www.imconf.net/imc-2007/papers/imc137.pdf

A server can measure many properties of a broadband link by sending a  
ping flood and measuring the inter-arrival times of the responses.  
This paper also explains how to measure many more properties than the  
usual bandwidth tests. The paper explicitly does not consider cross  
traffic (e.g. congestion caused by other subscribers of the same  
ISP), but for NN purposes cross traffic might be useful to measure.

It would be interesting to make such a server available to the public  
on an opt-in basis, giving users long-term statistics about their  
connections. Aggregation of such data could also help customers  
choose between ISPs.

Wes Felter - wesley@felter.org - http://felter.org/wesley/