NBD: Dipzoom: A Global Ecosystem for Internet Measurements

Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland OH

Investigators

Abstract

Internet measurements are crucial for enhancing and administering the Internet infrastructure as well as for grounded Internet performance research. Yet obtaining high quality representative measurements remains a daunting task, requiring expertise and professional connections that relatively few possess. The goal of this research is to explore an approach for providing diverse, representative, and easily accessible on-demand Internet measurements. Specifically, the approach in this project involves designing, prototyping, and studying a system named DipZoom (for ?Deep Internet Performance Zoom-in?), which is based on two key ideas. First, recognizing the difficulty any single provider would face in building a platform representative of the scale and diversity of the Internet, DipZoom implements a matchmaking service instead, using P2P concepts to bring together experimenters in need of measurements with external measurement providers. Thus, DipZoom leverages experimenters themselves in deploying a large number and variety of measuring points. Second, DipZoom provides a unified view over the entire network of measurement providers, which is accessible and controllable from a participant?s local machine. By removing the need to recruit and interact with individual measuring probes, DipZoom should drastically lower the barrier of entry for conducting quality Internet performance research. The intellectual merit of this project lies in the above ideas and in a number of new concepts and techniques these ideas entail, such as ranking of measurement providers, selective calibration of measuring hosts, selection of measuring hosts for a given measurement, identification of potential attacks and development of countermeasures, and so on. The broader impact includes making high-quality network measurements accessible to a wide technical community, and enhancing undergraduate education in computer networks by allowing networking courses to incorporate complex network measurement experiments.