Artur Janc, Craig Wills and Mark Claypool
The Web browser is increasingly used for emerging applications such as online games and streaming audio/video. End users seeking better quality for these applications need methods to ascertain network performance in a simple manner. This work investigates methods for measuring network performance through a Web browser and Flash plug-in while requiring only the minimal user participation of navigating to a Web page. A focus of the work is to complement explicit measurement techniques with new implicit measurement techniques we develop that allow performance measurements to arbitrary servers on the Internet and allow the measurement of delay jitter.
Results from the new techniques are compared against existing techniques for measuring download, upload, round-trip times and delay jitter across different operating system and browser environments. The results show that JavaScript and Flash techniques can be used to reliably estimate client download throughput and RTTs to arbitrary hosts, which could lead to customized tests and reports specifically for multimedia, game and other application sites of interest to users.
Download:
See also:
Alan Ritacco, Craig Wills and Mark Claypool. How's My Network? - A Java Approach to Home Network Measurement, In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), San Francisco, CA, USA, August 2009. http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/hmn-java/
Mark Claypool, Robert Kinicki and Craig Wills. Treatment-Based Traffic Signatures, Invited presentation at IMRG Workshop on Application Classification and Identification (WACI), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, October 2007. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/cube/