Speed testing without speed tests: estimating achievable download speed from passive measurements

How fast is the network? The speed at which real users can download content at different locations and at different times is an important metric for service providers. Knowledge of this speed helps determine where to provision more capacity and helps detect network problems. However, most network-level estimates of these speeds today are obtained using active "speed tests" that place substantial load on the network and are not necessarily representative of actual user experiences due to limited vantage points. These problems are exacerbated in wireless networks where the physical locations of users play an important role in performance. To redress these problems, this paper presents a new technique to estimate achievable download speed using only flow records collected passively. Estimating achievable speed passively is non-trivial because the measured throughput of real flows is often not comparable to the achievable steady-state TCP rate. This can be because, for example, ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Alexandre Gerber, Jeffrey Pang, Oliver Spatscheck, Shobha Venkataraman
• Keywords: Achievable Download Speed, Achievable Speed, IMC 2010, Internet Technology, Wireless Network