Crowdsourcing ISP Characterization to The Network Edge

Publication
Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM - W-MUST
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 userperceived 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 BitTorrentusers across 3,150 networks, togetherwiththereportedresultsfromtheU.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.