Abstract
Poor visibility into the network hampers progress in a number of important research areas, from network troubleshooting to Internet topology and performance mapping. This persistent, well-known problem has served as motivation for numerous proposals to build or extend existing Internet measurement platforms by recruiting larger, more diverse vantage points. Capturing the edge of the network, however, remains an elusive goal. We argue that at its root the problem is one of incentives. Today's measurement platforms build on the assumption that the goals of experimenters and those hosting the platform are the same. As much of the Internet growth occurs in residential broadband networks, this assumption no longer holds. We present a measurement experimentation platform that reaches the network edge by explicitly aligning the objectives of the experimenters with those of the users hosting the platform. Dasu - our current prototype - is designed to support both network measurement experimentation and broadband characterization. Dasu has been publicly available since July 2010 and has been installed by over 100 000 users with a heterogeneous set of connections spreading across 2431 autonomous systems (ASs) and 166 countries. We discuss some of the challenges we faced building and using a platform for the Internet's edge, describe its design and implementation, and illustrate the unique perspective its current deployment brings to Internet measurement.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 6898887 |
Pages (from-to) | 1944-1958 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2015 |
Funding
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Awards CNS 1218287, CNS 0917233 and II 0855253 and a Google Faculty Research Award. The authors would like to thank L. Alvisi, R. Isaacs, A. Seth, and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback. They are always grateful to P. Gardner for his assistance with Vuze and the many users of their software.
Keywords
- Internet experimentation
- Internet measurements
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Computer Science Applications
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering