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On this webpage, we present the results from our research in residential broadband networks. It includes the data sets we gathered and the tools we developed for our measurement studies. We also provide an easy-to-use tool that allows end users to measure their broadband link.
A large and rapidly growing proportion of users connect to the Internet via residential broadband networks such as DSL and cable. Residential networks are often the bottleneck in the last mile of today's Internet. Their characteristics critically affect Internet applications, including voice-over-IP, online games, and peer-to-peer content sharing/delivery systems. However, to date, very few studies have investigated commercial broadband deployments, and we lack rigorous measurement data that characterizes these networks at scale.
Our work addresses this situation. We measured the characteristics of almost 2000 broadband links in major cable and DSL ISPs in North America and Europe, and we make the data publicly available. Further, we provide a simple emulation tool that can be used to test systems and protocols in broadband environments using the data from our study.
Characterizing Residential Broadband Networks
[paper] [BibTeX]
Marcel Dischinger, Andreas Haeberlen, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Stefan Saroiu
In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2007,
San Diego, CA, USA, October 2007
Residential Broadband Networks: Characteristics and Implications
[poster]
Marcel Dischinger, Andreas Haeberlen, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Stefan Saroiu
Poster at NSDI 2007, Cambridge, MA, USA, April 2007
Here you can find the data sets that are presented in our IMC'07 paper.
Characteristics:
A table that lists various characteristics of broadband hosts as measured in our IMC paper. The table
includes properties like link bandwidths and router queue sizes in both upstream and downstream directions.
[dataset]
Traces:
If you are interested in the raw traces from our study, please contact us.
If you have questions about any of these data sets, please send e-mail to 
Simple tools to measure and to emulate residential broadband links. Our emulator models only a few important characteristics of broadband links namely, link bandwidths, router queue lengths, and link propagation delays. More details of the model and an overview of the emulator can be found here. The source distributions contain detailed instructions on how to use the emulators.
PlanetLab and Linux emulator
[source]
[configurations]
This implements a simple emulator that can be run on any Linux or PlanetLab machine.
A short tutorial on the emulator is included in the readme file in the archive.
The included configuration file already contains the parameters for all the broadband hosts from our
data set and can be used as a starting point for your experiments.
ns2
[source]
This ns2 module adds a special "broadband queue" to ns2, which emulates a broadband link.
The included readme tells how to set up simple broadband links from the data set published on this webpage.
| Faculty | Students | |
|---|---|---|
|
Krishna P. Gummadi
Stefan Saroiu |
Marcel Dischinger
Andreas Haeberlen |
If you are interested in learning more about our research in residential broadband networks or if you have questions, feedback, etc, you can contact us via e-mail: