Nicole Marwell | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Less is More: Optimizing Probe Selection Using Shared Latency Anomalies

Latency anomalies, defined as persistent or transient increases in round-trip time (RTT), are common in residential Internet performance. When multiple users observe anomalies to the same destination, this may reflect shared infrastructure, routing behavior, or congestion. Inferring such shared behavior is challenging because anomaly magnitudes vary widely across devices, even within the same ISP and geographic area, and detailed network topology information is often unavailable. We study whether devices experiencing a shared latency anomaly observe similar changes in RTT magnitude using a topology-agnostic approach. Using four months of high-frequency RTT measurements from 99 residential probes in Chicago, we detect shared anomalies and analyze their consistency in amplitude and duration without relying on traceroutes or explicit path information. Building on prior change-point detection techniques, we find that many shared anomalies exhibit similar amplitude across users, particularly within the same ISP. Motivated by this observation, we design a sampling algorithm that reduces redundancy by selecting representative devices under user-defined constraints. Our approach captures 95 percent of aggregate anomaly impact using fewer than half of the deployed probes. Compared to two baselines, it identifies significantly more unique anomalies at comparable coverage levels. We further show that geographic diversity remains important when selecting probes within a single ISP, even at city scale. Overall, our results demonstrate that anomaly amplitude and duration provide effective topology-independent signals for scalable monitoring, troubleshooting, and cost-efficient sampling in residential Internet measurement.

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arXiv2024

Beyond Data Points: Regionalizing Crowdsourced Latency Measurements

Despite significant investments in access network infrastructure, universal access to high-quality Internet connectivity remains a challenge. Policymakers often rely on large-scale, crowdsourced measurement datasets to assess the distribution of access network performance across geographic areas. These decisions typically rest on the assumption that Internet performance is uniformly distributed within predefined social boundaries. However, this assumption may not be valid for two reasons: crowdsourced measurements often exhibit non-uniform sampling densities within geographic areas; and predefined social boundaries may not align with the actual boundaries of Internet infrastructure. In this paper, we present a spatial analysis on crowdsourced datasets for constructing stable boundaries for sampling Internet performance. We hypothesize that greater stability in sampling boundaries will reflect the true nature of Internet performance disparities than misleading patterns observed as a result of data sampling variations. We apply and evaluate a series of statistical techniques to: aggregate Internet performance over geographic regions; overlay interpolated maps with various sampling unit choices; and spatially cluster boundary units to identify contiguous areas with similar performance characteristics. We assess the effectiveness of the techniques we apply by comparing the similarity of the resulting boundaries for monthly samples drawn from the dataset. Our evaluation shows that the combination of techniques we apply achieves higher similarity compared to directly calculating central measures of network metrics over census tracts or neighborhood boundaries. These findings underscore the important role of spatial modeling in accurately assessing and optimizing the distribution of Internet performance, to inform policy, network operations, and long-term planning decisions.

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