Internet access subscribers expect a satisfying quality of experience for any accessed
service, independently from time, place, and service- and content-type. Besides the
everincreasing amount of Internet data, the spectrum of video service platforms offering
sharing and streaming also got significantly more comprehensive. Internet access providers
try to avoid the exhaustion of network bandwidth by investing in network capacity
or setting up higher-level resource management within their infrastructure. The primary
question in this domain is how resource management constrains the subscriber to access
an arbitrary service and experience good service quality.This question directly relates
to network neutrality fundamentals. This paper presents a real-time full-reference
objective method to assess network neutrality. It contributes three novelties to support
user-centric analysis of potential restraints affecting Internet access quality: i)
the proposal supports application-specific measurements and involves real content
and real traffic, ii) the measured traffic originates from the content provider’s
cloud infrastructure, iii) reference is created in real time. Accordingly, the proposal
introduces a novel measurement layout. The key component is the emulated client that
provides the real-time reference by emulating the access properties of the real client
and accessing the same content simultaneously. We demonstrate the method’s feasibility
with an applicationaware proof-of-concept use case: video streaming from a public
VoD provider. We have validated the method against the emulated network parameters
using an extensive series of laboratory measurements.
