Why is this project important?
Our project is in the context of gateway selection in wireless
networks. We imagine a mesh of home users within a neighborhood,
where users have different ISPs. To contact a particular destination,
it may be in one user's best interest to not use their own connection
(with their home ISP), but to route through another user's connection
(using that user's ISP). Of course, this only makes sense if
performance to different destinations varies per-ISP. That is the
question which we are trying to answer with this project.
What exactly are you measuring?
We are measuring throughput and latency of Internet connections to
different destinations, as well as the Internet paths to those destinations.
How do you get your measurements?
We have a collection of hosts from which we periodically download
content (reasonably-sized files; not just index pages). We monitor
the time these downloads take, and based on that time and the file
size we can calculate the throughput to each destination. We can
calculate latency in a similar manner, by making a small request to a
host.
What type of data do you record?
We keep track of a few things:
- Meta-data, which includes the machine's IP address and OS.
- Throughput and latency characteristics, based on output
from wget.
Do your machines download illegal content?
Absolutely not.
Am I eligible to participate?
Probably! If you live in an urban area, you are almost certainly
qualified. Please see the How to Help page for
more information.
If I participate, will you give out my information?
Absolutely not.
If I participate, will it require a lot of effort on my part, or
will my Internet connection suffer because of your measurements?
Participation requires minimal effort on your part, but please see the
How to Help page for information on what we need.
Our measurements will use some of your bandwidth, naturally, but we
are not downloading huge files, so you probably won't notice. If our
scripts are running on your personal machine, we will not use your
disk space to store any of the downloaded files.
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