The popularity of DASH streaming is rapidly increasing and a number of commercial streaming services are adopting this new standard. While the benefits of building streaming services on top of the HTTP protocol are clear, further work is still necessary to evaluate and enhance the system performance from the perspective of the end user. Here we present a novel framework to evaluate the performance of rate-adaptation algorithms for DASH streaming using network measurements collected from more than a thousand Internet clients. Data, which have been made publicly available, are collected by a DASH module built on top of Neubot, an open source tool for the collection of network measurements. Some examples about the possible usage of the collected data are given, ranging from simple analysis and performance comparisons of download speeds to the performance simulation of alternative adaptation strategies using, e.g., the instantaneous available bandwidth values.
End user monitoring of quality of experience is one of the necessary steps to achieve an effective and winning control over network neutrality. The involvement of the end user, however, requires the development of light and user-friendly tools that can be easily run at the application level with limited effort and network resources usage. In this paper, we propose a simple model to estimate packet loss rate perceived by a connection, by round trip time and TCP goodput samples collected at the application level. The model is derived from the well-known Mathis equation, which predicts the bandwidth of a steady-state TCP connection under random losses and delayed ACKs and it is evaluated in a testbed environment under a wide range of different conditions. Experiments are also run on real access networks. We plan to use the model to analyze the results collected by the "network neutrality bot" (Neubot), a research tool that performs application-level network-performance measurements. However, the methodology is easily portable and can be interesting for basically any user application that performs large downloads or uploads and requires to estimate access network quality and its variations.
European Union (EU) member states consider themselves bulwarks of democracy and freedom of speech. However, there is a lack of empirical studies assessing possible violations of these principles in the EU through Internet censorship. This work starts addressing this research gap by investigating Internet censorship in Spain over 2016-2020, including the controversial 2017 Catalan independence referendum. We focus, in particular, on network interference disrupting the regular operation of Internet services or contents.We analyzed the data collected by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) network measurement tool. The measurements targeted civil rights defending websites, secure communication tools, extremist political content, and information portals for the Catalan referendum.Our analysis indicates the existence of advanced network interference techniques that grow in sophistication over time. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) initially introduced information controls for a clearly defined legal scope (i.e., copyright infringement).Our research observed that such information controls had been re-purposed (e.g., to target websites supporting the referendum).We present evidence of network interference from all the major ISPs in Spain, serving 91% of mobile and 98% of broadband users and several governmental and law enforcement authorities. In these measurements, we detected 16 unique blockpages, 2 Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) vendors, and 78 blocked websites.We also contribute an enhanced domain testing methodology to detect certain kinds of Transport Layer Security (TLS) blocking that OONI could not initially detect. In light of our experience analyzing this dataset, we also make suggestions on improving the collection of evidence of network interference. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.
The "network neutrality bot" (Neubot) is an evolving software architecture for distributed Internet access quality and network neutrality measurements. The core of this architecture is an open-source agent that ordinary users may install on their computers to gain a deeper understanding of their Internet connections. The agent periodically monitors the quality of service provided to the user, running background active transmission tests that emulate different application-level protocols. The results are then collected on a central server and made publicly available to allow constant monitoring of the state of the Internet by interested parties.In this article we describe how we enhanced Neubot architecture both to deploy a distributed broadband speed test and to allow the development of plug-in transmission tests. In addition, we start a preliminary discussion on the results we have collected in the first three months after the first public release of the software.
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