Agent-based platform for continuous measurement of Internet access quality of service

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) advertise their products focusing mainly on maximum achievable throughput and price. However, many other factors can influence what users perceive as good Quality of Service (QoS). In Portugal, ANACOM, the telecommunications regulator, performs frequent studies to evaluate the quality of the Internet access service offered by the various Portuguese ISPs. Traditionally, these studies have been carried out by resorting to carefully selected users, which run the measurement tests from their homes using special purpose equipment. This methodology makes the studies very expensive to setup and run, especially in rural areas. In this paper, we address the problem of large-scale, user-driven, measurements of the Internet access QoS on broadband connections, both wireless and wired. Our solution is based on three components: a software agent running on the participant's computer or smartphone, which performs scheduled or on demand measurements on its behalf, one or more endpoints against which the measurements are carried out and a central server that collects and processes the measurement results, and allows remote configuration and reporting through a Web portal. The agent reports geographical information whenever possible, enabling both nationwide and regional studies. To validate our proposal we developed a prototype including all components and tested it extensively. The results indicate that our system is able to operate correctly and scales well to large deployments. This work was the basis for the measurement system currently being deployed by ANACOM.