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An Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing

Published: 22 August 2016 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Large flows like videos consume significant bandwidth. Some ISPs actively manage these high volume flows with techniques like policing, which enforces a flow rate by dropping excess traffic. While the existence of policing is well known, our contribution is an Internet-wide study quantifying its prevalence and impact on video quality metrics. We developed a heuristic to identify policing from server-side traces and built a pipeline to deploy it at scale on traces from a large online content provider, collected from hundreds of servers worldwide. Using a dataset of 270 billion packets served to 28,400 client ASes, we find that, depending on region, up to 7% of lossy transfers are policed. Loss rates are on average six times higher when a trace is policed, and it impacts video playback quality. We show that alternatives to policing, like pacing and shaping, can achieve traffic management goals while avoiding the deleterious effects of policing.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        SIGCOMM '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference
        August 2016
        645 pages
        ISBN:9781450341936
        DOI:10.1145/2934872
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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        Publication History

        Published: 22 August 2016

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        Author Tags

        1. Network measurement
        2. TCP
        3. Traffic policing
        4. Traffic shaping

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        SIGCOMM '16: ACM SIGCOMM 2016 Conference
        August 22 - 26, 2016
        Florianopolis, Brazil

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        SIGCOMM '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 231 submissions, 17%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 554 of 3,547 submissions, 16%

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        • (2024)Accurate Throughput Prediction for Improving QoE in Mobile Adaptive StreamingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.3313592(1-18)Online publication date: 2024
        • (2024)Watching Stars in Pixels: The Interplay Of Traffic Shaping and YouTube Streaming QoE over GEO Satellite NetworksPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-56252-5_8(153-169)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
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