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Section: New Software and Platforms
Online HoA
Online implementation of home and access throughput bottleneck detection algorithm 'HoA'
Functional Description
"Home or Access" (HoA) is a system that localizes performance problems in home and access networks. Originally, we implement HoA as custom firmware that collect traces from off-the-shelf home routers. HoA uses timing and buffering information from passively monitored traffic at home routers to detect both access link and wireless network bottlenecks. HoA runs offline on a server to locate last-mile downstream throughput bottlenecks based on the analysis of packet traces collected from home routers. Our attempts to run HoA online on commodity home routers, however, revealed the challenges with performing per-packet analysis on such resource-constrained devices. The online HoA resolves this issue. We design an access bottleneck detector based on lightweight pings of the access link, and a wireless bottleneck detector based on a model of wireless capacity using metrics that are easily available in commodity home routers such as the wireless physical rate and the count of packets/bytes transmitted.