Monitoring Network Neutrality: A Survey on Traffic Differentiation Detection
Thiago Garrett, Ligia Eliana Setenareski, Letícia Mara Peres, Luis C. E. Bona, Elias P. Duarte · IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials · 2018
Network neutrality is becoming increasingly important as the global debate intensifies and governments worldwide implement and withdraw regulations. According to this principle, all Internet traffic must be processed without differentiation, regardless of origin, destination, and/or content. Neutrality supporters claim that traffic differentiation can compromise innovation, fair competition, and freedom of choice. However, detecting that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is not employing traffic differentiation practices is still a challenge. This paper presents a survey of strategies and tools for detecting traffic differentiation on the Internet. After presenting basic neutrality definitions as well as an overview of the worldwide debate, we describe ways that can be used by an ISP to implement traffic differentiation, and define the problem of differentiation detection. This is followed by a description of multiple existing strategies and tools. These solutions differ mainly on how they execute network measurements, the metrics employed, traffic generation techniques, and statistical methods. We also present a taxonomy for the different types of traffic differentiation and the different types of detection. Finally, we identify open challenges and future research directions.