Philip Eardley

Standardizing large-scale measurement platforms

Over the last few years, we have witnessed the deployment of large measurement platforms that enable measurements from many vantage points. Examples of these platforms include SamKnows and RIPE ATLAS. All told, there are tens of thousands of measurement agents. Most of these measurement agents are located in the end-user premises; these can run measurements against other user agents located in strategic locations, according to the measurements to be performed. Thanks to the large number of measurement agents, these platforms can provide data about key network performance indicators from the end-user perspective. This data is useful to network operators to improve their operations, as well to regulators and to end users themselves. Currently deployed platforms use proprietary protocols to exchange information between the different parts. As these platforms grow to become an important tool to understand network performance, it is important to standardize the protocols between the different elements of the platform. In this paper, we present ongoing standardization efforts in this area as well as the main challenges that these efforts are facing.

Building a standard measurement platform

Network management is achieved through a large number of disparate solutions for different technologies and parts of the end-to-end network. Gaining an overall view, and especially predicting the impact on a service user, is difficult. Recently, a number of proprietary platforms have emerged to conduct end-to-end testing from user premises; however, these are limited in scale, interoperability, and the ability to compare like-for-like results. In this article we show that these platforms share similar architectures and can benefit from the standardization of key interfaces, test definitions, information model, and protocols. We take the SamKnows platform as a use case and propose an evolution from its current proprietary protocols to standardized protocols and tests. In particular, we propose to use extensions of the IETFs IPFIX and NETCONF/YANG in the platform. Standardization will allow measurement capabilities to be included on many more network elements and user devices, providing a much more comprehensive view of user experience and enabling problems and performance bottlenecks to be identified and addressed.

Global Measurement Framework (Dagstuhl Seminar 13472)

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 13472 Global Measurement Framework.

Global Measurements: Practice and Experience (Report on Dagstuhl Seminar #16012)

This article summarises a 2.5 day long Dagstuhl seminar on Global Measurements: Practice and Experience held in January 2016. This seminar was a followup of the seminar on Global Measurement Frameworks held in 2013, which focused on the development of global Internet measurement platforms and associated metrics. The second seminar aimed at discussing the practical experience gained with building these global Internet measurement platforms. It brought together people who are actively involved in the design and maintenance of global Internet measurement platforms and who do research on the data delivered by such platforms. Researchers in this seminar have used data derived from global Internet measurement platforms in order to manage networks or services or as input for regulatory decisions. The entire set of presentations delivered during the seminar is made publicly available at [1].

Global Measurements: Practice and Experience (Dagstuhl Seminar 16012)

This article summarises a 2.5 day long Dagstuhl seminar on Global nMeasurements: Practice and Experience held in January 2016. This seminar was na followup of the seminar on Global Measurement Frameworks held in 2013, which nfocused on the development of global Internet measurement platforms and nassociated metrics. The second seminar aimed at discussing the practical nexperience gained with building these global Internet measurement platforms. nIt brought together people who are actively involved in the design and nmaintenance of global Internet measurement platforms and who do research on nthe data delivered by such platforms. Researchers in this seminar have used ndata derived from global Internet measurement platforms in order to manage nnetworks or services or as input for regulatory decisions. The entire set of npresentations delivered during the seminar is made publicly available at [1].

How to contribute research results to internet standardization

The development of new technology is driven by scientific research. The Internet, with its roots in the ARPANET and NSFNet, is no exception. Many of the fundamental, long-term improvements to the architecture, security, end-to-end protocols and management of the Internet originate in the related academic research communities. Even shorter-term, more commercially driven extensions are oftentimes derived from academic research. When interoperability is required, the IETF standardizes such new technology. Timely and relevant standardization benefits from continuous input and review from the academic research community.n For an individual researcher, it can however by quite puzzling how to begin to most effectively participate in the IETF and - arguably to a much lesser degree - in the IRTF. The interactions in the IETF are much different than those in academic conferences, and effective participation follows different rules. The goal of this document is to highlight such differences and provide a rough guideline that will hopefully enable researchers new to the IETF to become successful contributors more quickly.

A data fusion framework for large-scale measurement platforms

The need to assess internet performance from the users perspective grows, as does the interest in deployment of Large-Scale Measurement Platforms (LMAPs). The potential of these platforms as a real-time network diagnostic tool is limited by the volume, velocity and variety of the data they generated. Fusing this data from multiple sources and generating a single piece of coherent information about the state of the network would increase the efficiency of network monitoring. The current practice of visually analysing LMAPs data stream would certainly benefit from having automatically generated notifications in a timely manner alerting human controllers to the networks conditions of interest. This paper proposed a data fusion framework for LMAPs that makes use of mathematical distribution based sensors to generate probabilistic sensor outputs which are fused using a Dempster-Shafer Theory.