Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Internet latency: A large-scale study

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed the way of living of billions of people in a very short time frame. In this paper, we evaluate the impact on the Internet latency caused by the increased amount of human activities that are carried out on-line. The study focuses on Italy, which experienced significant restrictions imposed by local authorities, but results about Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, and the whole of Europe are also included. The analysis of a large set of measurements shows that the impact on the network can be significant, especially in terms of increased variability of latency. In Italy we observed that the standard deviation of the average additional delay – the additional time with respect to the minimum delay of the paths in the region – during lockdown is times as much as the value before the pandemic. Similarly, in Italy, packet loss is times as much as before the pandemic. The impact is not negligible also for the other countries and for the whole of Europe, but with different levels and distinct patterns.

Characterizing Service Provider Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

“…Because most previous studies [3,12,16] focus on Europe, we begin our explorations by validating whether similar traffic changes are observed in the United States. We consider peak hour link utilization from the Interconnect Measurement Project as a measure of traffic demand.…”

“…Previous work has shed light on the nature of the resulting changes in traffic patterns. In Europe, Internet exchange points saw a 15-20% increase in overall traffic volumes [3], in some cases resulting in peaks in round trip latency in some countries (e.g., Italy) that were approximately 30% higher than normal [12]. For cellular networks in the UK [16], because users were less mobile, downlink traffic volume decreased by up to 25%.…”

A First Look at COVID-19 Domain Names: Origin and Implications

“…Candela et al [4] conducted a large-scale analysis of Internet latencies, which could be affected by the increased amount of online activities during the lockdown. By leveraging the measurement data collected with the RIPE Atlas platform [17], they analyzed Internet latencies focusing on Italy, where people experienced more than a month of lockdown.…”

“…Several researchers have conducted Internet measurement studies to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the Internet and user behaviors [2,4,8,9,15]. Favale et al and Feldmann et al [8,9] explored the changes in Internet traffic, Lutu et al [15] explored the changes in traffic and its impact on user mobility in mobile operators, Candela et al [4] analyzed the impact of Internet traffic changes on network latency, and Boettger et al [2] analyzed the changes in social media access patterns and the implications. The details of these studies will be discussed in Sect.…”

Aptamers for Detection and Diagnostics (ADD) is a proposed mobile app acquiring optical data from conjugated quantum nanodots to identify molecules indicating presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus: Why public health and healthcare need smartphone sensors as a platform for early detection and prevention

“…Assigning weighted risk to data and running other analytics can be performed on the mobile device (smartphone) or in the cloud, depending on access to and quality of telecommunications infrastructure. Cloud computing could add latency 22 between upload and display of information or prediction, depending on availability, reliability and connectivity to the internet. Several regions of the world still lack sufficient access to the internet 23 .…”