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An Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing

Authors:

Pavlos Papageorge,

Andreas Terzis,

Ethan Katz-Bassett,

Ramesh GovindanAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference

Pages 468 - 482

https://doi.org/10.1145/2934872.2934873

Published: 22 August 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Large flows like videos consume significant bandwidth. Some ISPs actively manage these high volume flows with techniques like policing, which enforces a flow rate by dropping excess traffic. While the existence of policing is well known, our contribution is an Internet-wide study quantifying its prevalence and impact on video quality metrics. We developed a heuristic to identify policing from server-side traces and built a pipeline to deploy it at scale on traces from a large online content provider, collected from hundreds of servers worldwide. Using a dataset of 270 billion packets served to 28,400 client ASes, we find that, depending on region, up to 7% of lossy transfers are policed. Loss rates are on average six times higher when a trace is policed, and it impacts video playback quality. We show that alternatives to policing, like pacing and shaping, can achieve traffic management goals while avoiding the deleterious effects of policing.

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Cited By

Shan DJiang LZhang PJiang WLi HTang YRen F(2024)Enforcing Fairness in the Traffic Policer Among Heterogeneous Congestion Control AlgorithmsIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2023.327641032:1(34-49)Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2023.3276410
Zhu SLiu YGuo LZhang YLee J(2024)On Rate-Limiting in Mobile Data NetworksIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.339812523:12(11700-11718)Online publication date: Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2024.3398125
Lv GWu QTan QWang WLi ZXie G(2024)Accurate Throughput Prediction for Improving QoE in Mobile Adaptive StreamingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.3313592(1-18)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2023.3313592
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Index Terms

An Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing
1. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network measurement
    2. Network performance analysis

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference

August 2016

645 pages

ISBN:9781450341936

DOI:10.1145/2934872

General Chairs:
Marinho Barcellos
UFRGS
,
Jon Crowcroft
University of Cambridge
,
Program Chairs:
Amin Vahdat
Google
,
Sachin Katti
Stanford University

Copyright © 2016 Owner/Author.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 22 August 2016

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SIGCOMM '16: ACM SIGCOMM 2016 Conference

August 22 - 26, 2016

Florianopolis, Brazil

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SIGCOMM '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 231 submissions, 17%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2023.3276410
Zhu SLiu YGuo LZhang YLee J(2024)On Rate-Limiting in Mobile Data NetworksIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.339812523:12(11700-11718)Online publication date: Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2024.3398125
Lv GWu QTan QWang WLi ZXie G(2024)Accurate Throughput Prediction for Improving QoE in Mobile Adaptive StreamingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.3313592(1-18)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2023.3313592
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