Title
An Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing.
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2934872.2934873
SIGCOMM
Field
DocType
Citations 
Heuristic,Computer security,Computer science,Server,Network packet,Computer network,Bandwidth (signal processing),Traffic shaping,Video quality,Traffic policing,The Internet
Conference
12
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.69
34
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tobias Flach11528.30
Pavlos Papageorge2261.40
Andreas Terzis32449169.59
Luis D. Pedrosa4724.84
Yuchung Cheng5117077.65
Tayeb Karim6120.69
Ethan Katz-Bassett7115562.80
ramesh govindan8154302144.86