On the Feasibility of Switching ISPs in Residential Multihoming

In theory, multihomed Internet hosts, that is, hosts simultaneously connected to multiple Internet service providers (ISP) should see increased access capacity, be able to circumvent possible last-mile congestion problems, and experience improved end-to-end quality of service (QoS). In practice however, the advantages one can gain from multihoming are highly dependent on the path switching mechanism used, that is, on dynamically deciding which ISP should be used as a first-hop. This paper is a first step toward understanding the trade-off between performance improvements multihoming can help achieve and the complexity of the decisions that must be made. We measure changes in end-to-end network layer metrics (loss, latency, jitter) over the different paths available from a multihomed host to a large population of Internet hosts. Our measurements indicate that 1) in over 60% of the cases, one only needs to reevaluate the service provided by each ISP every minute to improve the performance of a specific metric, and that 2) in approximately 85% of the cases, decisions to switch from one ISP to another can be treated independently of the service metric of interest. We conclude that multihoming could in practice result in noticeable performance improvements.