research-article

Detecting traffic differentiation in backbone ISPs with NetPolice

Authors:

Zhuoqing Morley Mao,

Ming ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '09: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement

Pages 103 - 115

https://doi.org/10.1145/1644893.1644905

Published: 04 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Traffic differentiations are known to be found at the edge of the Internet in broadband ISPs and wireless carriers [13, 2]. The ability to detect traffic differentiations is essential for customers to develop effective strategies for improving their application performance. We build a system, called NetPolice, that enables detection of content- and routing-based differentiations in backbone ISPs. NetPolice is easy to deploy since it only relies on loss measurement launched from end hosts. The key challenges in building NetPolice include selecting an appropriate set of probing destinations and ensuring the robustness of detection results to measurement noise.

We use NetPolice to study 18 large ISPs spanning 3 major continents over 10 weeks in 2008. Our work provides concrete evidence of traffic differentiations based on application types and neighbor ASes. We identify 4 ISPs that exhibit large degree of differentiation on 4 applications and 10 ISPs that perform previous-AS hop based differentiation, resulting in up to 5% actual loss rate differences. The significance of differences increases with network load. Some ISPs simply differentiate traffic based on port numbers irrespective of packet payload and the differentiation policies may only be partially deployed within their networks. We also find strong correlation between performance differences and Type-of-Service value differences in the traffic.

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Index Terms

Detecting traffic differentiation in backbone ISPs with NetPolice
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols
    1. Transport protocols
  2. Network types
    1. Public Internet

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cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '09: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement

November 2009

468 pages

ISBN:9781605587714

DOI:10.1145/1644893

Program Chairs:
Anja Feldmann
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories / TU Berlin
,
Laurent Mathy
Lancaster University

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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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 04 November 2009

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IMC '09

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SIGCOMM

IMC '09: Internet Measurement Conference

November 4 - 6, 2009

Illinois, Chicago, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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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
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