TY - GEN
T1 - Measuring the performance of user traffic in home wireless networks
AU - Sundaresan, Srikanth
AU - Feamster, Nick
AU - Teixeira, Renata
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - This paper studies how home wireless performance characteristics affect the performance of user traffic in real homes. Previous studies have focused either on wireless metrics exclusively, without connection to the performance of user traffic; or on the performance of the home network at higher layers. In contrast, we deploy a passive measurement tool on commodity access points to correlate wireless performance metrics with TCP performance of user traffic. We implement our measurement tool, deploy it on commodity routers in 66 homes for one month, and study the relationship between wireless metrics and TCP performance of user traffic. We find that, most of the time, TCP flows from devices in the home achieve only a small fraction of available access link throughput; as the throughput of user traffic approaches the access link throughput, the characteristics of the home wireless network more directly affect performance.We also find that the 5 GHz band offers users better performance better than the 2.4GHz band, and although the performance of devices varies within the same home, many homes do not have multiple devices sending high traffic volumes, implying that certain types of wireless contention may be uncommon in practice.
AB - This paper studies how home wireless performance characteristics affect the performance of user traffic in real homes. Previous studies have focused either on wireless metrics exclusively, without connection to the performance of user traffic; or on the performance of the home network at higher layers. In contrast, we deploy a passive measurement tool on commodity access points to correlate wireless performance metrics with TCP performance of user traffic. We implement our measurement tool, deploy it on commodity routers in 66 homes for one month, and study the relationship between wireless metrics and TCP performance of user traffic. We find that, most of the time, TCP flows from devices in the home achieve only a small fraction of available access link throughput; as the throughput of user traffic approaches the access link throughput, the characteristics of the home wireless network more directly affect performance.We also find that the 5 GHz band offers users better performance better than the 2.4GHz band, and although the performance of devices varies within the same home, many homes do not have multiple devices sending high traffic volumes, implying that certain types of wireless contention may be uncommon in practice.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84924358881&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_23
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_23
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84924358881
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 305
EP - 317
BT - Passive and Active Measurement - 16th International Conference, PAM 2015, Proceedings
A2 - Liu, Yong
A2 - Mirkovic, Jelena
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 16th International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement, PAM 2015
Y2 - 19 March 2015 through 20 March 2015
ER -