OMware: an open measurement ware for stable residential broadband measurement

Abstract

A number of home-installed middleboxes, e.g., BISMark and SamKnows, and web-based tools, e.g., Netalyzr and Ookla's speedtest service, have been developed recently to enable residential broadband users to gauge their network service quality. One challenge to designing these systems is to provide stable network measurement. That is, the measurement results will not be fluctuated by sporadic overheads incurred inside the middlebox or web browser. In this poster, we propose a network measurement ware, OMware, to increase the stability of residential broadband measurement. The key feature is to implement the send and receive functions for measurement packets in the kernel. Our preliminary evaluation for an OpenWrt implementation shows that OMware provides very stable throughput and delay measurement, compared with typical socket-based measurement at the user level.