Section: New Results

Pinpointing Home and Access Network Delays Using WiFi Neighbors

Participants: Lucas Di Cioccio (LIP6/Technicolor), Martin May (Technicolor), Jim Kurose (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Renata Teixeira

Home Internet users and Internet access providers need tools to assist them in diagnosing and troubleshooting network performance problems. Today, expert users may rely on simple techniques using round-trip-measurements to local and remote points to locate delays on an end-to-end path. Unfortunately, round-trip measurements do not provide accurate diagnoses in the presence of asymmetric link capacities and performance, which is often the case in residential access. Our work  [8] introduces neighbor-assisted delay diagnosis (NADD) - an approach for pinpointing the location of delays (among the home, access, and wide-area network), leveraging end-host multi-homing capabilities. NADD runs on an end host connected simultaneously to the home gateway and to a neighbor WiFi access point. Our evaluation shows that NADD efficiently detect and distinguish uplink and downlink delays with small error. In addition, we learn from a proof-of-concept deployment in five homes in France that our techniques can work “in the wild.” Technicolor filed a patent on this work  [8] .