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 …
| Talk Title | An Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing |
| Speakers | Tobias Flach (Google) |
| Conference | NANOG69 |
| Conf Tag | |
| Location | Washington, D.C. |
| Date | Feb 6 2017 - Feb 8 2017 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | Talk Video |
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 loss 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. Notes: We originally presented the research results at SIGCOMM 2016. The plan for NANOG is to extend the talk to include recent efforts at Google to better deal with negative side effects of policing.
