Identifying Traffic Prioritization on the Internet
Vahab Pournaghshband · 2023
ISPs report that the use of VR, video streaming, online gaming, and video conferencing is on the rise in recent years. This rise in the popularity of bandwidth-hungry applications, coupled with resource-constrained networks, has reignited discussion about how different applications’ network traffic is treated (or mistreated) by ISPs. There is already evidence that some ISPs are discriminating against certain traffic by prioritizing others. In most cases, ISPs do not reveal the details about their potentially discriminatory behavior. In this paper, we propose an active probing tool that enables end-users to detect whether their ISPs are implementing any prioritization scheduling mechanism. Our technique is non-intrusive and robust to cross traffic. It is entirely end-to-end, requiring no special network support. We have used simulations and Internet experiments to evaluate our approach. Our findings demonstrate an accurate detection of prioritization.