Abstract

Residential Internet access and home networks recently re-ceive a lot of attention from the research community, the reg-ulatory agencies, and ISPs. Home gateways provide Internet connectivity for increasing numbers of devices, serving sev-eral purposes such as telephony, media-streaming, data, or gaming. Thus, troubleshooting and monitoring home net-works is fundamental to understand their problems and chal-lenges. Since monitoring the home from an end-device is re-stricted in terms of what can be monitored, projects such as SamKnows (UK & US) rely on active measurements from the home gateway. In this paper, we want to explore the next step: Passive measurements on home gateways. We experi-mentally analyze resource consumption of running tcpdump capturing traffic forwarded by different home gateways. We find that it is feasible to do so for throughputs in the order of typical DSL access speeds. Yet, capturing fully loaded Fast Ethernet or faster links is more challenging. 1.