Marionette Measurement: Measurement Support Under the PacketLab Model

The PacketLab Internet measurement framework is designed to facilitate vantage point (VP) sharing for active Internet measurements. The core idea behind PacketLab is to have experimenters instruct remote VPs to perform a series of monitored low-level network operations to conduct measurements, which would reduce costs and security concerns of VP sharing. Despite these benefits, PacketLab users have to update their existing tools to adapt to the new measurement model, where available VP capabilities and the method of access differ from traditional models such as shell access to VPs. This change in the measurement model introduces limitations in measurement feasibility that merit deeper analysis. We undertook this analysis, based on a survey of recent Internet measurement studies, followed by a result accuracy evaluation of PacketLab implementations of selected representative measurements. Our results showed the PacketLab measurement model allows the implementation of a major portion (40 out of 54 studies, 74%) of distributed active measurements in relevant studies in our survey. Further evaluation also showed that the PacketLab model not only accurately supports a diverse set of measurements ranging from latency, throughput, network path, to other non-timing data categories, but also measurement requiring precise spatial and temporal coordination. To assist with porting non-timing data measurements to PacketLab, we also introduce a new porting tool, pktwrap, which allows existing measurement executables to communicate over PacketLab without modification.