The network neutrality bot architecture: A preliminary approach for self-monitoring of Internet access QoS

The “network neutrality bot” (Neubot) is an evolving software architecture for distributed Internet access quality and network neutrality measurements. The core of this architecture is an open-source agent that ordinary users may install on their computers to gain a deeper understanding of their Internet connections. The agent periodically monitors the quality of service provided to the user, running background active transmission tests that emulate different application-level protocols. The results are then collected on a central server and made publicly available to allow constant monitoring of the state of the Internet by interested parties. In this article we describe how we enhanced Neubot architecture both to deploy a distributed broadband speed test and to allow the development of plug-in transmission tests. In addition, we start a preliminary discussion on the results we have collected in the first three months after the first public release of the software.