This paper performs controlled experiments with two popular virtualization techniques, Linux-VServer and Xen, to examine the effects of virtualization on packet sending and receiving delays. Using a controlled setting allows us to independently investigate the influence on delay measurements when competing virtual machines (VMs) perform tasks that consume CPU, memory, I/O, hard disk, and network bandwidth. Our results indicate that heavy network usage from competing VMs can introduce delays as high as 100 ms to round-trip times. Furthermore, virtualization adds most of this delay when sending packets, whereas packet reception introduces little extra delay. Based on our findings, we discuss guidelines and propose a feedback mechanism to avoid measurement bias under virtualization.

The success of over-the-top (OTT) services reflects users' demand for personalization of digital services at home. ISPs propose fulfilling this demand with a cloud delivery model, which would simplify the management of the service portfolio and bring them additional revenue streams. We argue that this approach has many limitations that can be fixed by turning the home gateway into a flexible execution platform. We define requirements for such a "service-hosting gateway" and build a proof of concept prototype using a virtualized Intel Groveland system-on-a-chip platform. We discuss remaining challenges such as service distribution, security and privacy, management, and home integration.