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SUMMARY:Characterizing and Improving Last-Mile Performance Using Home Netw
 orking Infrastructure - Srikanth Sundaresan\, College of Computing\, Georg
 ia Tech
DTSTART:20140326T090000Z
DTEND:20140326T100000Z
UID:TALK51649@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins
DESCRIPTION:More than a billion people access the Internet through residen
 tial broadband connections worldwide\, and this number is projected to gro
 w further. Surprisingly\, little is known about some important properties 
 of these networks: What performance do users obtain from their ISP? What f
 actors affect performance of broadband networks? Are users bottlenecked by
  their ISP or by their home network? How are applications such as the Web 
 affected by these networks? Answering these questions is difficult\; there
  is tremendous diversity of technologies and applications in home and broa
 dband networks. While a lot of research has tackled these questions piecem
 eal\, the lack of a good vantage point to obtain good measurements from th
 ese networks makes it notably difficult to do a holistic characterization 
 of the “last mile”.\n\nThe home gateway presents a unique vantage poin
 t to characterize home and access networks and mitigate performance bottle
 necks that are specific to such networks. It is always on and\, as the hub
  of the network\, it can directly observe the home network\, the access ne
 twork\, and user traffic. In this talk\, I describe one such gateway-based
  platform\, BISmark\, that currently has nearly 200 active access points i
 n over 20 countries. I will present a holistic characterization of three i
 mportant components of the last mile using the gateway as the vantage poin
 t: the access link that connects the user to the wider Internet\, the home
  network to which devices connect\, and the performance of the Web\, one o
 f the most commonly used applications in today’s Internet.\n\nBISmark us
 es custom gateways to enable measurements and evaluate performance optimiz
 ations directly from home networks. I will present a characterization of a
 ccess link performance in the US using measurements from the gateway\; I e
 valuate existing techniques and propose new techniques that help us unders
 tand these networks better. I will then describe a new system that uses pa
 ssive measurements at the gateway to localize bottlenecks to either the wi
 reless network or the access link. Using this system\, which has been depl
 oyed in 64 homes worldwide\, I characterize the nature of bottlenecks\, an
 d the state of the wireless network in these homes - specifically I show h
 ow the wireless network is rarely the bottleneck as throughput exceeds 35 
 Mbits/s. Finally\, I characterize bottlenecks that affect Web performance 
 that are specific to the last mile. I will show how latency in the last mi
 le results in page load times stagnating at throughput exceeding 16 Mbits/
 s\, and how simple techniques deployed at the gateway can mitigate these b
 ottlenecks.
LOCATION:Small Lecture Theatre\, Microsoft Research Ltd\, 21 Station Road\
 , Cambridge\, CB1 2FB
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