Abstract
Residential networks are home to increasingly diverse devices, including embedded devices that are part of the Internet of Things phenomenon, leading to new management and security challenges. However, current residential solutions that rely on customer premises equipment (CPE), which often remains deployed in homes for years without updates or maintenance, are not evolving to keep up with these emerging demands. Recently, researchers have proposed to outsource the tasks of managing and securing residential networks to cloud-based security services by leveraging software-defined networking (SDN). However, the use of cloud-based infrastructure may have performance implications. In this paper, we measure the performance impact and perception of a residential SDN using a cloud-based controller through two measurement studies. First, we recruit 270 residential users located across the United States to measure residential latency to cloud providers. Our measurements suggest the cloud controller architecture provides 90% of end-users with acceptable performance with judiciously selected public cloud locations. When evaluating web page loading times of popular domains, which are particularly latency-sensitive, we found an increase of a few seconds at the median. However, optimizations could reduce this overhead for top websites in practice.
