Approximate mechanism for measuring stability of Internet link in aggregated Internet pipe

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, low-overhead method for measuring internet connection stability using HTTP responses, which can be extended to aggregated links and aids in routing and load-balancing decisions.

Contribution

It presents a novel stability measurement approach that incorporates historic data and can be applied to aggregated internet connections for improved routing and load balancing.

Findings

Effective stability measurement using normalized HTTP responses.

Method successfully extended to aggregated internet connections.

Provides a dynamic threshold for routing and load balancing.

Abstract

In this article we propose a method for measuring internet connection stability which is fast and has negligible overhead for the process of its complexity. This method finds a relative value for representing the stability of internet connections and can also be extended for aggregated internet connections. The method is documented with help of a real time implementation and results are shared. This proposed measurement scheme uses HTTP GET method for each connections. The normalized responses to identified sites like gateways of ISPs, google.com etc are used for calculating current link stability. The novelty of the approach is that historic values are used to calculate overall link stability. In this discussion, we also document a method to use the calculated values as a dynamic threshold metric. This is used in routing decisions and for load-balancing each of the connections in an aggregated bandwidth pipe. This scheme is a very popular practice in aggregated internet connections.