Measuring Network Latency from a Wireless ISP: Variations Within and Across Subnets

Abstract

While Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have traditionally focused on marketing network throughput, it is becoming increasingly recognized that network latency also plays a significant role for the quality of experience. However, many ISPs lack the means to continuously monitor network la-tency for their service. In this work, we present a method to continuously monitor and aggregate network latency per subnet directly in the Linux kernel by leveraging eBPF. We deploy this solution on a middlebox in an ISP network, and collect an extensive dataset of latency measurements for both the internal and external parts of the network. In our analysis, we find a wide latency tail in the last mile access, which varies over time of day, increasing during the evening. We also find large differences in latency across different external networks, where traffic to Asian and African regions show high and variable RTTs, while the RTTs for the most common autonomous systems have a low and narrow RTT distribution, indicating that the traffic is largely served by CDNs at nearby Internet exchange points.

This paper was accepted at ACM IMC’24

Authors

Simon Sundberg  (Karlstad University)
Anna Brunstrom  (Karlstad University)
Simone Ferlin-Reiter (Red Hat)
Toke Høiland-Jørgensen (Red Hat)
Robert Chacón (JackRabbit Wireless)

Citation

Sundberg, S., Brunstrom, A., Ferlin-Reiter, S., Høiland-Jørgensen, T., & Chacón, R. (2024). Measuring Network Latency from a Wireless ISP: Variations Within and Across Subnets – Dataset [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13388093