Is it me?: understanding the impact of the home network on end-to-end measurements

Abstract

End users are often curious to verify the performance of their network connection. Mostly, they accomplish this task with end-to-end active measurements. Unfortunately, the home network can affect end-to-end measurement and can lead to erroneous conclusions. This paper performs measurements in a controlled environment to understand the effect of cross traffic from home on the measurement. We show that although the impact from cross-traffic can be large, it is hard to detect it with active measurements in the home network.