Fast and light bandwidth testing for internet users

Xinlei Yang, Xianlong Wang, Zhenhua Li, Yunhao Liu, Feng Qian, Liangyi Gong, Rui Miao, Tianyin Xu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Bandwidth testing measures the access bandwidth of end hosts, which is crucial to emerging Internet applications for network-aware content delivery. However, today's bandwidth testing services (BTSes) are slow and costly-the tests take a long time to run, consume excessive data usage at the client side, and/or require large-scale test server deployments. The inefficiency and high cost of BTSes root in their methodologies that use excessive temporal and spatial redundancies for combating noises in Internet measurement. This paper presents FastBTS to make BTS fast and cheap while maintaining high accuracy. The key idea of FastBTS is to accommodate and exploit the noise rather than repetitively and exhaustively suppress the impact of noise. This is achieved by a novel statistical sampling framework (termed fuzzy rejection sampling). We build FastBTS as an end-toend BTS that implements fuzzy rejection sampling based on elastic bandwidth probing and denoised sampling from highfidelity windows, together with server selection and multihoming support. Our evaluation shows that with only 30 test servers, FastBTS achieves the same level of accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art BTS (SpeedTest.net) that deploys ∼12,000 servers. Most importantly, FastBTS makes bandwidth tests 5.6× faster and 10.7× more data-efficient.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2021
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages1011-1026
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781939133212
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Apr 12 2021Apr 14 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2021

Conference

Conference18th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period4/12/214/14/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Control and Systems Engineering

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