research-article

Detecting network neutrality violations with causal inference

Authors:

Mukarram Bin Tariq,

Murtaza Motiwala,

Mostafa AmmarAuthors Info & Claims

CoNEXT '09: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies

Pages 289 - 300

https://doi.org/10.1145/1658939.1658972

Published: 01 December 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We present NANO, a system that detects when ISPs apply policies that discriminate against specific classes of applications, users, or destinations. Existing systems for detecting discrimination are typically specific to an application or to a particular discrimination mechanism and rely on active measurement tests. Unfortunately, ISPs can change discrimination policies and mechanisms, and they can evade these tests by giving probe traffic higher priority. NANO detects ISP discrimination by passively collecting performance data from clients. To distinguish discrimination from other causes of degradation (e.g., overload, misconfiguration, failure), NANO establishes a causal relationship between an ISP and observed performance by adjusting for confounding factors. NANO agents deployed at participating clients across the Internet collect performance data for selected services and report this information to centralized servers, which analyze the measurements to establish causal relationship between an ISP and performance degradations. We have implemented NANO and deployed clients in a controlled environment on Emulab. We run a combination of controlled experiments on Emulab and wide-area experiments on PlanetLab that show that NANO can determine the extent and criteria for discrimination for a variety of discrimination policies and applications.

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604828
Khandkar VHanawal M(2023)FairNet: A Measurement Framework for Traffic Discrimination Detection on the InternetIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.326337320:4(4097-4109)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3263373
Khandkar VHanawal M(2022)Challenges in Net Neutrality Violation Detection: A Case Study of Wehe Tool and Improvements2022 14th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS)10.1109/COMSNETS53615.2022.9668372(506-514)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2022
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Index Terms

Detecting network neutrality violations with causal inference
1. Networks
  1. Network services
    1. Network management
    2. Network monitoring

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CoNEXT '09: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies

December 2009

362 pages

ISBN:9781605586366

DOI:10.1145/1658939

General Chairs:
Jörg Liebeherr
University of Toronto, Canada
,
Giorgio Ventre
University of Napoli, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Ernst Biersack
Eurecom, France
,
S. Keshav
University of Waterloo, Canada

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 December 2009

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Co-NEXT '09

Sponsor:

SIGCOMM

Co-NEXT '09: Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

December 1 - 4, 2009

Rome, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 789 submissions, 25%

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Bothra CGao JRao SRibeiro BSchulzrinne HKohler EMaltz DMisra V(2023)Veritas: Answering Causal Queries from Video Streaming TracesProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604828(738-753)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604828
Khandkar VHanawal M(2023)FairNet: A Measurement Framework for Traffic Discrimination Detection on the InternetIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.326337320:4(4097-4109)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3263373
Khandkar VHanawal M(2022)Challenges in Net Neutrality Violation Detection: A Case Study of Wehe Tool and Improvements2022 14th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS)10.1109/COMSNETS53615.2022.9668372(506-514)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMSNETS53615.2022.9668372
Maillé PTuffin BMaillé PTuffin B(2022)Tools to Monitor NeutralityFrom Net Neutrality to ICT Neutrality10.1007/978-3-031-06271-1_9(157-168)Online publication date: 11-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06271-1_9
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