Household bandwidth and the ‘need for speed’: Evaluating the impact of active queue management for home internet traffic
Main Article Content
Keywords
home broadband, bandwidth, domestic settings, Active-queue management, Internet traffic,
Abstract
In this paper, we aim to contribute to the policy debate on bandwidth needs by considering more closely what happens in household networks. We draw upon both social and technical studies modelling household applications and their uses to show how queue management protocols impact bandwidth needs. We stress the impact of internet traffic streams interfering with each other, and describe three different categories of internet traffic. We demonstrate how the use of active queue management can reduce bandwidth demands. In doing so we consider how, and to what degree, household internet connections are a constraint on internet use. We show that speed demand predictions are skewed by a perceived need to protect the Quality of Service experienced by latency-sensitive services when using current gateway technologies.
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References
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Gregg, M. 2011. Work's intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press. U.S.A.
Hassoun, D. (2014). ‘Tracing attentions: Toward an analysis of simultaneous media use’. Television & New Media, 15(4), 271-288.
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Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., & Davis, H. (2011). ‘Dwelling with media stuff: latencies and logics of materiality in four Australian homes’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(4), 693-715.
Nichols, K., & Jacobson, V. (2016). ‘Controlled delay active queue management’. IETF Draft, December 22. Available from: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-aqm-codel-06
Pan, R., Natarajan, P., Piglione, C., Prabhu, M. S., Subramanian, V., Baker, F., & VerSteeg, B. (2013). ‘PIE: A lightweight control scheme to address the bufferbloat problem’. In High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR), 14th International Conference (pp. 148-155). IEEE.
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Thomas, J., Barraket, J., Ewing, S., MacDonald, T., Mundell, M. & Tucker, J. (2016). ‘Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2016’. Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, for Telstra. Available from: https://digitalinclusionindex.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Australian-Digital-Inclusion-Index-2016.pdf
Turner, V. (2016). ‘The internet of things: Getting ready to embrace its impact on the digital economy’. International Data Corporation. Available from: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=DR2016 GS4 VT
Wac, K., Ickin, S., Hong, J. H., Janowski, L., Fiedler, M., & Dey, A. K. (2011). ‘Studying the experience of mobile applications used in different contexts of daily life’. In Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Measurements up the stack (pp. 7-12). ACM.
Wilken, R., Arnold, M., & Nansen, B. (2011). ‘Broadband in the home pilot study: suburban Hobart’. Telecommunications Journal of Australia, 61(1), 5-1.
Wilken, R., Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Kennedy, J., & Gibbs, M. (2013). ‘National, local and household media ecologies: The case of Australia's National Broadband Network’. Communication, Politics & Culture, 46(2).
Arapakis, I., Bai, X., & Cambazoglu, B. B. (2014, July). ‘Impact of response latency on user behavior in web search’. In Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research & development in information retrieval (pp. 103-112). ACM.
Armitage, G., Claypool, M., & Branch, P. (2006). Networking and online games: understanding and engineering multiplayer Internet games. Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons. U.S.A.
Armitage, G. & Heyde, A. (2012). ‘REED: Optimising First Person Shooter Game Server Discovery using Network Coordinates’. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMCCAP), 8 (2). Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2168996.2169000
Armitage, G., Kennedy, J., Nguyen, S., Thomas, J. & Ewing, S. (2017). ‘Household internet and the ‘need for speed’: evaluating the impact of increasingly online lifestyles and the internet of things’. Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures, Technical Report 170113A. Available from: http://caia.swin.edu.au/reports/170113A/CAIA-TR-170113A.pdf
Ceaparu, I., Lazar, J., Bessiere, K., Robinson, J., & Shneiderman, B. (2004). ‘Determining causes and severity of end-user frustration’. International journal of human-computer interaction, 17(3), 333-356.
Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications. (2015). ‘Economic benefit of the National Broadband Network’. Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications. Available from: http://www.ceet.unimelb.edu.au/publications/ceet-economic-impact-nbn.pdf.
Deloitte. (2016), ‘Australia’s Digital Pulse 2016’. Deloitte Access Economics, for Australian Computer Society. Available from: https://www.acs.org.au/content/dam/acs/acs-documents/PJ52569-Australias-Digital-Pulse-2016_LAYOUT_Final_Web.pdf
Gartner. (2015). ‘Gartner says 6.4 billion connected “things” will be in use in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015’. Gartner Inc. 2015. Available from: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3165317
Gettys, J. & Nichols, K. (2011). ‘Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet’. Queue, 9 (11), pp. 40-54.
Gregg, M. 2011. Work's intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press. U.S.A.
Hassoun, D. (2014). ‘Tracing attentions: Toward an analysis of simultaneous media use’. Television & New Media, 15(4), 271-288.
Hoeiland-Joergensen, T., Hurtig, P. & Brunstrom, A. (2015). ‘The Good, the Bad and the WiFi: Modern AQMs in a residential setting’. Computer Networks, 89, pp. 90-106.
Hoeiland-Joergensen, T., McKenney, P., Gettys, J., & Dumazet, E. (2016). ‘The FlowQueue-CoDel Packet Scheduler and Active Queue Management Algorithm’. IETF Draft, March 18. Available from: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-aqm-fq-codel-06.
Kennedy, J., Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Wilken, R., & Gibbs, M. (2015). ‘Digital housekeepers and domestic expertise in the networked home’. Convergence, 21(4), 408-422.
Kennedy, J., Wilken, R., Nansen, B., Arnold, M., & Harrop, M. (2017). ‘Overcoming the tyranny of distance? High speed broadband and the significance of place’. In Griffiths, M. & Barbour, K. Making Publics, Making Places. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press.
Kenny, R. & Broughton, T. (2014). ‘Domestic bandwidth requirements in Australia: A forecast for the period 2013-2023’. Communications Chambers, for The CIE. Available from: https://www.communications.gov.au/sites/g/files/net301/f/Forecasting-Australian-Per-Household-Bandwidth-Demand-Commun.pdf
Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M. R., & Davis, H. (2009). ‘Domestic orchestration: Rhythms in the mediated home’. Time & Society, 18(2-3), 181-207.
Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., & Davis, H. (2010). ‘Time, space and technology in the working?home: an unsettled nexus’. New Technology, Work and Employment, 25(2), 136-153.
Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., & Davis, H. (2011). ‘Dwelling with media stuff: latencies and logics of materiality in four Australian homes’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(4), 693-715.
Nichols, K., & Jacobson, V. (2016). ‘Controlled delay active queue management’. IETF Draft, December 22. Available from: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-aqm-codel-06
Pan, R., Natarajan, P., Piglione, C., Prabhu, M. S., Subramanian, V., Baker, F., & VerSteeg, B. (2013). ‘PIE: A lightweight control scheme to address the bufferbloat problem’. In High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR), 14th International Conference (pp. 148-155). IEEE.
Telsyte. (2015). ‘Internet Uninterrupted: Australian Households of the Connected Future’. Telsyte, for NBN Co. Available from: http://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbnco2/documents/Internet%20Uninterrupted%20Australian%20Households%20of%20the%20Connected%20Future.pdf
Thomas, J., Barraket, J., Ewing, S., MacDonald, T., Mundell, M. & Tucker, J. (2016). ‘Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2016’. Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, for Telstra. Available from: https://digitalinclusionindex.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Australian-Digital-Inclusion-Index-2016.pdf
Turner, V. (2016). ‘The internet of things: Getting ready to embrace its impact on the digital economy’. International Data Corporation. Available from: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=DR2016 GS4 VT
Wac, K., Ickin, S., Hong, J. H., Janowski, L., Fiedler, M., & Dey, A. K. (2011). ‘Studying the experience of mobile applications used in different contexts of daily life’. In Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Measurements up the stack (pp. 7-12). ACM.
Wilken, R., Arnold, M., & Nansen, B. (2011). ‘Broadband in the home pilot study: suburban Hobart’. Telecommunications Journal of Australia, 61(1), 5-1.
Wilken, R., Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Kennedy, J., & Gibbs, M. (2013). ‘National, local and household media ecologies: The case of Australia's National Broadband Network’. Communication, Politics & Culture, 46(2).
Article Sidebar
Published
Jun 12, 2017
Article Details
How to Cite
Kennedy, J., Armitage, G., & Thomas, J. (2017). Household bandwidth and the ‘need for speed’: Evaluating the impact of active queue management for home internet traffic. Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, 5(2), 113–130. https://doi.org/10.18080/jtde.v5n2.99
Issue
Section
Telecommunications
Copyright Telecommunications Association Inc.
Author Biographies
Jenny Kennedy, RMIT University
Jenny Kennedy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. She is a member of the Technology, Communication and Policy Lab (http://digital-ethnography.com/portfolio-posts/technology-communications-policy-lab/). Jenny’s current research interests span social media, technology and the everyday, ebook lending, and the domain names industry.Grenville Armitage, Swinburne
GRENVILLE ARMITAGE earned a B.Eng. in electrical engineering (Hons) in 1988 and a Ph.D. in electronic engineering in 1994, both from the University of Melbourne. He is a full professor of telecommunications engineering, was founding director of the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures, and is founding Head of the Internet For Things (I4T) Research Lab at Swinburne University of Technology. He authored “Quality of Service In IP Networks: Foundations for a Multi-Service Internet” (Macmillan, April 2000) and co-authored Networking and Online Games “Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games” (Wiley, April 2006). He is a member of IEEE, ACM and ACM SIGCOMM.Professor Armitage has been active in the data networking research community for over two decades, pursuing experimental and applied research. In recent years his research focus is on engineering the Internet to become a unified, resilient and reliable communications platform for billions of humans and orders of magnitude more devices embedded in our built environments.
Julian Thomas, RMIT University
Julian Thomas is the Director of the Technology, Communication and Policy Lab at DERC and the Director for the Enabling Capability Platform for Social Change at RMIT. He is a researcher in digital media and the internet, including media, communications and information policy and the history of communications technologies. Julian’s recent work includes the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (2016), Internet on the Outstation (Institute of Network Cultures, 2016), and The Informal Media Economy (Polity, 2015).Julian was previously the Director of the Swinburne Institute for Social Research (SISR), and Professor of Media and Communications. Julian is Chair of the management committee of the website Australian Policy Online, and is a member of the Telstra CEO’s Consumer Forum, the ARC College of Experts, and the Advisory Board of QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre.
