An Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing
Venue
SIGCOMM (2016) (to appear)
Publication Year
2016
Authors
Tobias Flach, Pavlos Papageorge, Andreas Terzis, Luis Pedrosa, Yuchung Cheng, Tayeb Karim, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Ramesh Govindan
BibTeX
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 hundreds of
servers worldwide within one of the largest online content providers. 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 6× 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.
