A Measurement Experimentation Platform at the Internet's Edge

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.