Design and Implementation of Web-Based Speed Test Analysis Tool Kit

Web-based speed tests are popular among end-users for measuring their network performance. Thousands of measurement servers have been deployed in diverse geographical and network locations to serve users worldwide. However, most speed tests have opaque methodologies, which makes it difficult for researchers to interpret their highly aggregated test results, let alone leverage them for various studies. In this paper, we propose WebTestKit, a unified and configurable framework for facilitating automatic test execution and cross-layer analysis of test results for five major web-based speed test platforms. Capturing only packet headers of traffic traces, WebTestKit performs in-depth analysis by carefully extracting HTTP and timing information from test runs. Our testbed experiments showed WebTestKit is lightweight and accurate in interpreting encrypted measurement traffic. We applied WebTestKit to compare the use of HTTP requests across speed tests and investigate the root causes for impeding the accuracy of latency measurements, which play a vital role in test server selection and throughput estimation.