A Platform for End-Host-based Active Measurements on the Internet
Michael Faath · Universitätsbibliothek der FU Berlin Hochschulschriftenstelle u. Dokumentenserver · 2016
The size and complexity of the Internet grow continuously. Billions of interconnected devices communicate over this large network of networks, transporting a steadily increasing amount of traffic. As the Internet grows, the importance of it as a vital telecommunications infrastructure is increasing as well. Given its role and importance, it is somewhat worrisome that an accurate status of the operational state of the Internet cannot reasonably be obtained. Many interesting questions about the Internet and its performance are difficult to answer and it would require a large number of vantage points to answer some of them. There is no complete "map"' of the Internet and when problems occur, it is often difficult to identify their source, in particular in an automated fashion. Measurement platforms could continuously monitor vital functions of the Internet and help to detect, locate and solve problems in the network. There is a great interest from Internet Service Providers (ISPs), end-users, and content providers to be alerted quickly if something is not working as expected, to pinpoint problems, and even to fix a problem before it manifests in some kind of performance problem or outage. Therefore, it would be beneficial to have a standardized way to execute distributed measurements on the Internet. Multiple organizations and projects, for example the Large-Scale Measurement of Broadband Performance (LMAP) working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or the EU project mPlane, worked and still work on the standardization of measurement platforms. Those efforts make it possible to coordinate and execute comparable measurements on distributed probes, using common interfaces that allow different vendors of probes and other components of such measurement platforms to interoperate. GLIMPSE (Global Internet Monitoring and Probing System) is a concrete example of a platform for active measurement campaigns, which was developed alongside currently evolving standards. This platform can schedule measurement campaigns on a large number of probes deployed on common devices of end-users. The data produced by these measurements can be used to find and analyze anomalies in the Internet. This dissertation gives an overview of standardization efforts, tools, and projects in the field of platforms for active measurements on the Internet. GLIMPSE, a platform developed as part of this dissertation, is used to describe the characteristics, design, implementation and limitations of such platforms. A glimpse into the possible research and the obtainable results is given by looking at real measurement campaigns realized with this system. One such campaign shows for example how a popular method widely used by end-users for measuring network access rates at home is flawed. GLIMPSE was build at a time of active standardization in the field of large-scale measurement platforms. To give researchers and developers data and advice as a basis to decide if it is worth to use still evolving pre-standards in their work, an analysis of the document process within the IETF was performed. Also, the main challenges when designing and implementing a platform for measurements with a large number of end-users have been identified and analyzed. GLIMPSE probes rely solely on active measurements. In order to showcase the research potential of passive measurements on end-device probes, an analysis of broadcast and multicast traffic captured passively on such devices has been carried out. The results of this research was brought to the attention of the Internet Area working group of the IETF and has been adopted by that group as a working group item at the time of this writing. The respective Internet draft lists considerations for broadcast and multicast protocol designers.