Probe and pray: using UPnP for home network measurements

Speaker : Lucas DiCioccio
UPMC
Date: 29/02/2012
Time: 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: LINCS Meeting Room 40

Abstract

Preview of talk/ workshop at PAM 2012.

Network measurement practitioners increasingly focus their interest on understanding and debugging home networks. The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technology holds promise as a highly efficient way to collect and leverage measurement data and configuration settings available from UPnP-enabled devices found in home networks. Unfortunately, UPnP proves less available and reliable than one would hope. In this paper, we explore the usability of UPnP as a means to measure and characterize home networks. We use data from 120,000 homes, collected with the HomeNet Profiler and Netalyzr troubleshooting suites. Our re- sults show that in the majority of homes we could not collect any UPnP data at all, and when we could, the results were frequently inaccurate or simply wrong. Whenever UPnP-supplied data proved accurate, however, we demonstrate that UPnP provides an array of useful measurement techniques for inferring home network traffic and losses, for identifying home gateway models with configuration or implementation issues, and for obtaining ground truth on access link capacity.

Joint work with Renata Teixeira (UPMC Sorbonne Universites and CNRS), Martin May (Technicolor), and Christian Kreibich (ICSI).