Application-Aware Analysis of Network Neutrality: A Scalable Real-Time Method

Abstract

Internet access subscribers expect a satisfying quality of experience for any accessed service, independently from time, place, and service- and content-type. Besides the everincreasing amount of Internet data, the spectrum of video service platforms offering sharing and streaming also got significantly more comprehensive. Internet access providers try to avoid the exhaustion of network bandwidth by investing in network capacity or setting up higher-level resource management within their infrastructure. The primary question in this domain is how resource management constrains the subscriber to access an arbitrary service and experience good service quality.This question directly relates to network neutrality fundamentals. This paper presents a real-time full-reference objective method to assess network neutrality. It contributes three novelties to support user-centric analysis of potential restraints affecting Internet access quality: i) the proposal supports application-specific measurements and involves real content and real traffic, ii) the measured traffic originates from the content provider’s cloud infrastructure, iii) reference is created in real time. Accordingly, the proposal introduces a novel measurement layout. The key component is the emulated client that provides the real-time reference by emulating the access properties of the real client and accessing the same content simultaneously. We demonstrate the method’s feasibility with an applicationaware proof-of-concept use case: video streaming from a public VoD provider. We have validated the method against the emulated network parameters using an extensive series of laboratory measurements.