Proposition de stage 2009/2010
Topic: Measuring and characterizing home network traffic Durée : 5 ou 6 mois
Équipe d’accueil :
Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Laboratoire LIP6-CNRS, équipe NPA (réseaux) Contact : renata.teixeira@lip6.fr
Responsables :
Renata Teixeira, Chargée de Recherche CNRS, LIP6 Fabian Schneider, Post-doc, LIP6
Mots clés :
Internet measurements, active and passive measurements, home network, home gateways, packet traces
Descriptif :
Residential access networks, such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and cable are seeing steady deployment. Over the past decade, Internet usage has grown by more than 3.5 times, to about 1.6 billion users, about 300 million of which are broadband subscribers. Despite this increasing
penetration very little is known about the performance experienced by users of broadband or access networks or about their traffic characteristics (with few exceptions [1,2]). A better understanding of home users’ performance and workload are essential for engineering networks that better adapt to users’ workloads and designing applications that take the best use of the network resources.
The goal of this internship is to study methods to characterize traffic (i.e. which protocols are used, number of concurrent connections or traffic volume per day) and performance of residential users (i.e.
achieved throughput, ping delay). There are three basic approaches to measure home user
performance: (1) place monitoring agents directly at the end-user’s machine; (2) probe user access links from a server connected to the Internet [2]; or (3) access network providers can deploy monitors inside their network to passively capture packets from home users [1]. Each of these techniques has advantages and drawbacks. The goal of this internship is to explore tradeoffs between them. The NPA group at LIP6 already has access to months of FTP download and upload measurements as well as round-trip times that were collected directly from thousands of homes in France by grenouille.com.
Through collaboration we have the possibility to run analyses on packet traces collected inside the network of a large European DSL provider as well as to the measurements collected by Dischinger et al. [2]. The student will analyze these datasets and replicate some of the measurements in a common environment (for the same set of users, at the same time) to compare the three techniques.
The challenges of this work are conducting different types of measurements and processing a large number of experimental datasets. Some experience with network measurement tools and scripting languages will be helpful. The student should develop scientific skills on Internet measurements and data mining as well as scientific writing and presentation.
[1] G. Maier, A. Feldmann, V. Paxson, M. Allman, “On Dominant Characteristics of Residential Broadband Internet Traffic”, ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2009.
[2] M. Dischinger, A. Haeberlen, K. P. Gummadi, and S. Saroiu, “Characterizing residential broadband networks”, ACM Internet Measurement Conference, 2007.
