Characterizing end-host application performance across multiple networking environments

Overview & Synopsis

Users today connect to the Internet everywhere - from home, work, airports, friend's homes, and more. This paper characterizes how the performance of networked applications varies across networking environments. Using data from a few dozen end-hosts, we compare the distributions of RTTs and download rates across pairs of environments. We illustrate that for most users the performance difference is statistically significant. We contrast the influence of the application mix and environmental factors on these performance differences.