Using Gaming Footage as a Source of Internet Latency Information

Keeping track of Internet latency is a classic measurement problem. Open measurement platforms like RIPE Atlas are a great solution, but they also face challenges: preventing network overload that may result from uncontrolled active measurements, and maintaining the involved devices, which are typically contributed by volunteers and non-profit organizations, and tend to lag behind the state of the art in terms of features and performance. We explore gaming footage as a new source of real-time, publicly available, passive latency measurements, which have the potential to complement open measurement platforms. We show that it is feasible to mine this source of information by presenting Tero, a system that continuously downloads gaming footage from the Twitch streaming platform, extracts latency measurements from it, and converts them to latency distributions per geographical location. Our data-sets and source code are publicly available at https://nal-epfl.github.io/tero-project.