Fast and Light Bandwidth Testing for Mobile Internet

Bandwidth testing measures the access bandwidth of end hosts, which is crucial to emerging Internet applications for network-aware content delivery. However, todays bandwidth testing services (BTSes) are slow and costly for mobile Internet users, especially 5G users. The inefficiency and high cost of BTSes root in their methodologies that use excessive temporal and spatial redundancies for combating noises in Internet measurement. This chapter presents FastBTS to make BTS fast and cheap while maintaining high accuracy. Its key idea is to accommodate and exploit the noise rather than repetitively and exhaustively suppress the impact of noise. This is achieved by a novel statistical sampling framework (termed fuzzy rejection sampling), based on elastic bandwidth probing and denoised sampling from high-fidelity windows. Our evaluation shows that with only 30 test servers, FastBTS achieves the same level of accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art BTS (SpeedTest.net) that deploys similar to 12,000 servers. Most importantly, FastBTS makes bandwidth tests 5.6x faster and 10.7x more data-efficient.