Classification of access network types: Ethernet, wireless LAN, ADSL, cable modem or dialup?

Ethernet, wireless LAN, ADSL, cable modem, and dialup are common access networks that have dramatically different characteristics. Fast and accurate classification of access networks can benefit a wide range of applications. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient end-to-end scheme to classify access networks into three categories: Ethernet, wireless LAN and low-bandwidth connection. Our scheme is based on the intrinsic characteristics of the various access networks, and utilizes the median and entropy of packet-pair inter-arrival times. Extensive experiments show that our scheme obtains accurate classification results in a very short time (95% accuracy in 2 s, with 10 packet pairs). © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.