Keynote Talk: Diagnosis of Internet Quality of Experience in Home Networks

Renata Teixeira INRIA Paris (France)

Biography:

Renata Teixeira is a senior researcher at Inria Paris. She received her Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, in 2005. During her Ph.D. studies, she worked on Internet routing at the AT&T Research. She was a researcher with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at LIP6, UPMC Sorbonne Universites, Paris, France from 2006 to 2013. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeyley/ICSI in 2011. Her research interests are in measurement, analysis, and management of data networks. Renata is co-auhtor of the MOOC “Internet Measurements: A Hands-on Introduction”. She appeared in the 2017 list of “N2Women: Stars in Computer Networking and Communications”. Renata was vice-chair of ACM SIGCOMM. She was a member of the steering committee of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference and has been active in the program committees of ACM SIGCOMM, ACM IMC, ACM CoNEXT, IEEE INFOCOM, among others.

Abstract:

With the availability of cheap broadband connectivity, Internet  access from the home has become a ubiquity and the home network has become an important part of the “Internet experience”, or Quality of Experience (QoE).  In conventional networks, expert administrators are responsible for managing the network and to identify the root-cause of any problems affecting users. In contrast, most home networks have no technically skilled network administrator. Home users often simply blame their Internet Service Provider (ISP) when QoE degrades. Our research provides tools to assist home users and ISPs in diagnosing QoE degradation. This talk will discuss the challenges of conducting research in home network diagnosis. It will then present results of our research leveraging the home router as a monitoring point within the home. For example, our analysis of 2,652 homes across the United States shows that wireless bottlenecks are more common than access-link bottlenecks (particularly for home networks with downstream throughput greater than 20 Mbps). We also study the effects of  the home wireless on QoE of four popular applications: Web, YouTube, and audio/video RTC. Our analysis of Wi-Fi metrics collected from 832 homes customers of a large residential ISP shows that  QoE is good in most cases, still we find  9% of poor QoE samples. Worse, approximately 10% of stations have more than 25% poor QoE samples.