Impact of home networks on end-to-end performance: controlled experiments

This paper performs controlled experiments to analyze the performance of home networks. We show that the home network has a significant impact on end-to-end performance. For example, watching TV can double the time to download a file; and deploying a wireless network significantly increases round-trip times. Despite its impact on end-to-end performance, most existing diagnosis tools ignore the home network when identifying the cause of performance problems. To make matters worse, our results show that simple techniques that directly probe the home gateway cannot reliably identify that the home network is the cause of performance degradation. We are currently designing a technique based on packet bursts to identify performance problems caused by the home network. Our results for Ethernet based home networks are encouraging.