ShaperProbe: end-to-end detection of ISP traffic shaping using active methods

Abstract

We present an end-to-end measurement method for the detection of traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is typically implemented using token buckets, allowing a maximum burst of traffic to be serviced at the peak capacity of the link, while any remaining traffic is serviced at a lower shaping rate. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we develop an active end-to-end detection mechanism, referred to as ShaperProbe, that can infer whether a particular path is subject to traffic shaping, and in that case, estimate the shaper characteristics. Second, we analyze results from a large-scale deployment of ShaperProbe on M-Lab over the last 24 months, detecting traffic shaping in several major ISPs. Our deployment has received more than one million runs so far from 5,700 ISPs.