Selection of Existing Probes and Datasets

The mPlane architecture has been designed to include the possibility to interface with existing systems and platforms. While most measurement platforms in existence target a very specific measurement use case (e.g., the discovery of the Internet's router-level topology, the continuous measurement of the RTT among host pairs, the exporting via SNMP of network state, etc.), there are platforms that have a large deployed base, with lot of data being at disposal, and/or continuously
collecting data. It would be a waste of resources to merely reproduce this effort within mPlane. Instead, mPlane aims at directly interfacing with existing systems and re-using their capabilities and data to feed measurement results to the mPlane intelligence. This document lists selected existing systems that are important for mPlane either for theoretical, conceptual or practical reasons, and that are part of the background of mPlane partners. A sub-set of these systems will be eventually incorporated into mPlane by developing the necessary interfaces. Others could be integrated by the means of proxy probes,
i.e., the conceptual component responsible for such interfacing. The main focus of this document is to elaborate the concept of proxy probes, enumerate the systems that will be possibly considered for interface (proxy probe) development, and to
give high level descriptions of the proxy probe design for these systems. The following list enumerates the systems that the consortium has chosen to include:
- QoF - a TCP-aware IPFIX flow meter Cisco Ping and SLA Agents - commercial availability and basic network parameter agents
- Tracebox - a tool for middlebox detection and identification
- Scamper - a sophisticated active probing tool
- MERLIN - a router-level topology discovery tool
- TopHat - a configurable measurement system on top of PlanetLab
- Tstat - a passive network monitoring tool
- BlockMon - a flexible network monitoring and analysis tool
- MisuraInternet - a QoS measurement system
- Firelog - a Firefox plugin to measure HTTP QoE
- Pytomo - an end-host-based video OoE measurement tool
- DATI - a high performance deep packet inspector
- MobiPerf - a tool for monitoring smartphone performance