Flux Research Group / School of Computing

Towards a High Quality Path-oriented Network Measurement and Storage System

David Johnson, Daniel Gebhardt, and Jay Lepreau

Proceedings of the 9th Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM) 2008.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-79232-1_11

areas
Networking

abstract

Researchers need current and historical measurements of Internet paths. We built and deployed a complete system designed to fill these needs: a safe, shareable, multi-user active network measurement system probes network paths and reliably records measurements in a storage facility with multiple levels of caching, providing users with fast, flexible querying. Our system, deployed on PlanetLab for over 20 months, has accumulated 940 million measurements and made them publicly available in a separate, federated data repository. Our experience shows that building and running such a valuable research tool poses significant engineering and practical challenges.