Network tomography is the study of a network's traffic characteristics using measures.
This subject has already been addressed by a whole community of researchers, especially to answer the need for knowledge of residential Internet traffic that ISPs have to carry.
One of the main aspects of the Internet is that it evolves very quickly, so that there is a never ending need for Internet measurements. In this work, we address the issue of residential Internet measure from two different perspectives: passive measurements and active measurements. In the first part of this thesis, we passively collect and analyse statistics of residential users' connections spanning over a whole week. We use this data to update and deepen our knowledge of Internet residential traffic. Then, we use clustering methods to form groups of users according to the application they use. This shows how the vast majority of customers are now using the Internet mainly for Web browsing and watching video Streaming. This data is also used to evaluate new opportunities for managing the traffic of a local ADSL platform. As the main part of the traffic is video streaming, we use multiple snapshots of packet captures of this traffic over a period of many years to accurately understand its evolution. Moreover we analyse and correlate its performance, defined out of quality of service indicators, to the behavior of the users of this service.
In the second part of this thesis, we take advantage of this knowledge to design a new tool for actively probing the quality of experience of video streaming sites.
We have modeled the playback of streaming videos so that we are able to figure out its quality as perceived by the users.
With this tool, we can understand the impact of the video server selection and the DNS servers on the user's perception of the video quality.
Moreover the ability to perform the experiments on different ISPs allows us to further dig into the delivery policies of video streaming sites.
