NeTS: Small: Broadband Service Reliability: Characterization and Improvement

本项目研究宽带服务的可靠性，探索可靠性与用户体验质量之间的关系，并研究基于边缘的解决方案来提高可靠性。它开发技术和调查指标来研究和表征可靠性问题，并开发算法来诊断和定位其来源，建立在现有基础设施和数据的基础上，这些数据是联邦通信委员会测量美国宽带的努力的一部分。这项调查探讨了可靠性问题对用户体验质量(QOE)的影响，探索了QOE的可能代理指标(例如，会话时间、流量需求)的价值，并应用自然实验和相关设计来了解它们在规模上的关系，同时控制了大多数混杂因素。了解可靠性问题、其影响和最常见的原因，应有助于开发可随时部署的解决方案，以提高网络边缘的服务可靠性。随着住宅宽带网络可用性和性能的提高，消费者继续将电话、电视和家庭监控等关键服务迁移到过顶的替代方案。这种迁移伴随着用户对宽带可靠性的期望不断提高，这是消费者体验的一个关键因素。尽管可靠性工程有着丰富的历史，但研究人员对宽带环境下的可靠性的了解非常有限，从表征它的最合适的衡量标准，到收集测量数据或评估其对用户体验质量的影响的方法。当可靠性问题出现时，故障排除几乎是不可能的--没有原则性的方法来确定问题的根源。其结果是用户的挫败感增加，互联网服务提供商的管理成本增加，最终导致应用程序表现不佳。该项目加强了本科生和研究生的教学，让本科生参与研究项目，接触到行业，为研究人员提供工具和首个同类数据集，并为联邦和州电信监管机构提供数据收集平台和数据。我们将开发的算法、工具、技术和实验方法将帮助用户、运营商和政策制定者为未来的投资提供更坚实的统计基础。

This project studies the reliability of broadband services, explores the relation between reliability and users' quality of experience and investigates edge-based solutions to improve reliability. It develops techniques and investigates metrics to study and characterize reliability problems, and algorithms to diagnose and localize their source, building on existing infrastructure and data collected as part of the Federal Communications Commission's Measuring Broadband America effort. This investigation explores the impact of reliability problems on users' Quality of Experience (QoE), exploring the value of possible proxy metrics for QoE (e.g., session time, traffic demand) and the application of natural experiments and related designs to understand their relationship at scale while controlling for most confounding factors. An understanding of reliability problems, their impact and most common causes should help in the development of readily deployable solutions that might improve service reliability at the network edge.As residential broadband network availability and performance improves, consumers continue to migrate key services such as telephony, television and home monitoring to over-the-top alternatives. This migration comes with rising users' expectations regarding broadband reliability, which is a key factor of consumer experience. Despite the rich history of reliability engineering, researcher have very limited understanding of reliability in the context of broadband, from the most appropriate metrics for characterizing it, to approaches for gathering measurements or assessing their impact on users' quality of experience. When reliability problems appear, troubleshooting them is nearly impossible -- there is no principled approach to determining the source of the problem. The outcome is increased frustration for users, growing management costs for Internet service providers, and, ultimately, underperforming applications. The project enhances undergraduate and graduate teaching, involves undergraduates in research projects, reaches out to industry, provides tools and first-of-its-kind datasets to researchers, and offers a data gathering platform and data for the benefit of Federal and State telecom regulators. The algorithms, tools, techniques and experimental approaches we will develop will help users, operators and policymakers providing a firmer statistical footing for future investment.