Characterizing bufferbloat and its impact at end-hosts

Abstract

While buffers on forwarding devices are required to handle bursty Internet traffic, overly large or badly sized buffers can interact with TCP in undesirable ways. This phenomenon is well understood and is often called "bufferbloat". Although a number of previous studies have shown that buffering (particularly, in home) can delay packets by as much as a few seconds in the worst case, there is less empirical evidence of tangible impacts on end-users. In this paper, we develop a modified algorithm that can detect bufferbloat at individual end-hosts based on passive observations of traffic. We then apply this algorithm on packet traces collected at 55 end-hosts, and across different network environments. Our results show that 45 out of the 55 users we study experience bufferbloat at least once, 40% of these users experience bufferbloat more than once per hour. In 90% of cases, buffering more than doubles RTTs, but RTTs during bufferbloat are rarely over one second. We also show that web and interactive applications, which are particularly sensitive to delay, are the applications most often affected by bufferbloat. © 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.