As part of a project to develop a user-centered network measurement platform that limits impediments to participation, this work focuses on using the execution of a signed Java applet for home network measurement. We have developed a Java applet tool to understand the capabilities of such a tool for measuring characteristics of a user's network environment from the browser. This paper reports on the capabilities of the tool, the measurement methodology employed, and initial results obtained for a set of residential users employing the tool. Despite the sandbox-type restrictions in Java, the results include information about the configuration of the user's testing machine, wireless connectivity of the testing machine, available upload and download throughput, DNS performance and the number and type of devices on the user's network.

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See also:

• Artur Janc, Craig Wills and Mark Claypool. Network Performance Evaluation in a Web Browser, In Proceedings of the 21st IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS), Cambridge, MA, USA, November 2009. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/hmn-flash/

• 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/