Polus: Detecting and Characterising Latency Under Load In Multi-Bottleneck Wireless Internet Service Provider Networks

Bufferbloat, or excessive queuing delay under load, is a noticeable quality of service degradation that occurs when latency-sensitive traffic experiences the effects of increased packet buffering delays in network devices. This phenomenon leads to increased latency and reduced network performance, particularly affecting real-time voice and video traffic, online gaming, and other interactive applications that demand low-latency at all times. Bufferbloat also poses serious risks to future ambitions of latency-critical applications such as telesurgery, autonomous vehicles, and virtual reality, as it undermines network consistency and creates significant operational issues for service providers to manage. Bufferbloat is especially detrimental to Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs), due to their often ad-hoc and dynamic nature. To better characterise the prevalence of bufferbloat, we analyse a real-world WISP network and propose "Polus", a framework for detecting and characterising adverse network conditions caused by the phenomenon.