Charactering network latency in China: A view from gateway

Abstract

Popular network applications (e.g. web access, social network apps) are mostly delay sensitive. Therefore, understanding the characteristics of latency in broadband network is of extreme importance for SPs, ISPs and individual users as well. The previous studies show that last-mile latency is the bottleneck of network latency in developed countries. In this paper, we analyze network latency in China from three perspectives: last-mile latency, MAN latency and backbone latency. We deploy specific measurement tools at the home gateway on several hundred users’ side to measure the latency with LAN and ADSL access technology. Based on the measured results of 4 months, we found that: (i) compared to the backbone latency, the last-mile latency is not the bottleneck in China, and it is even less than the MAN latency with LAN access technology; (ii) more interestingly, due to the tree architecture that has been widely adopted in China, the port selection of backbone router which the MAN network connected to has a distinctly effect on the MAN latency; (iii) furthermore, we present the study of what factors and how they influence the three parts of end-to-end network latency.

Keywords

Broadband networks gateway

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