The Measurement Manager: Modular and Efficient End-to-End Measurement Services

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Date
2008-11-24Author
Papageorgiou, Pavlos
Advisor
Hicks, Michael
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Show full item recordAbstract
End-to-end network measurement is used to improve the precision,
efficiency, and fairness for a variety of Internet protocols
and applications. Measurement is typically performed in one
of three ways: (1) actively, by injecting specially crafted
probe packets into the network, (2) passively, by observing
existing data traffic, and (3) customized, where applications
use their own traffic to perform customized measurements.
All current approaches suffer from drawbacks. Passive techniques
are efficient but are constrained by the shape of the existing
traffic. Active techniques are faster, more accurate and more
flexible but impose a significantly higher overhead. And finally,
custom techniques combine flexibility with efficiency, but are so
tightly coupled with each application that they are not reusable.
To address these shortcomings, we present the Measurement Manager,
a practical, modular, and efficient service for performing end-to-end
network measurements between hosts. Our architecture introduces a new
hybrid approach to network measurement, where applications can pool
together their data packets to be reused as padding inside network
probes in a transparent and systematic way. We achieve this through
the Measurement Manager Protocol (MGRP), a new transport protocol
for sending probes that combines data packets and probes on the fly.
In MGRP, active measurement algorithms specify the probes they wish
to send using a Probe API and applications allow MGRP to use data
from their own packets to fill the otherwise wasted probe padding.
We have implemented the Measurement Manager inside the Linux kernel
and have adapted existing applications and active measurement tools
to use our system. Through experimentation we provide detailed
empirical evidence that piggybacking data packets on measurement
probes is not only feasible but improves source and cross traffic
as well as the performance of measurement algorithms while not
affecting their accuracy. We show that the Measurement Manager is
an architecture with broad applications that can be used to build a
generic measurement overlay network as well as expanding the solution
space for estimation algorithms, since every application packet can
now act as a potential probe.