Trying Broadband Characterization at Home

In recent years the quantity and diversity of Internet-enabled consumer devices in the home have increased significantly. These trends complicate device usability and home resource management and have implications for crowdsourced approaches to broadband characterization. The UPnP protocol has emerged as an open standard for device and service discovery to simplify device usability and resource management in home networks. In this work, we leverage UPnP to understand the dynamics of home device usage, both at a macro and micro level, and to sketch an effective approach to broadband characterization that runs behind the last meter. Using UPnP measurements collected from over 13K end users, we show that while home networks can be quite complex, the number of devices that actively and regularly connect to the Internet is limited. Furthermore, we find a high correlation between the number of UPnPenabled devices in home networks and the presence of UPnP-enabled gateways, and show how this can be leveraged for effective broadband characterization.