Publications on Measurement

• Detecting BitTorrent Blocking. Marcel Dischinger, Alan Mislove, Andreas Haeberlen, and Krishna P. Gummadi. 8th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '08), Vouliagmeni, Greece, Oct 2008.
  
  × @inproceedings{dischinger-2008-bittorrent,
    author = {Marcel Dischinger and Alan Mislove and Andreas Haeberlen and Krishna P. Gummadi},
    title = {Detecting {BitTorrent} Blocking},
    booktitle = {8th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '08)},
    location = {Vouliagmeni, Greece},
    month = oct,
    year = 2008
  }
  ×

  Recently, it has been reported that certain access ISPs are surreptitiously blocking their customers from uploading data using the popular BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. The reports have sparked an intense and wide-ranging policy debate on network neutrality and ISP traffic management practices. However, to date, end users lack access to measurement tools that can detect whether their access ISPs are blocking their BitTorrent traffic. And since ISPs do not voluntarily disclose their traffic management policies, no one knows how widely BitTorrent traffic blocking is deployed in the current Internet. In this paper, we address this problem by designing an easy-to-use tool to detect BitTorrent blocking and by presenting results from a widely used public deployment of the tool.

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• SatelliteLab: Adding Heterogeneity to Planetary-Scale Network Testbeds. Marcel Dischinger, Andreas Haeberlen, Ivan Beschastnikh, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Stefan Saroiu. 2008 ACM SIGCOMM Conference (SIGCOMM '08), Seattle, WA, Aug 2008.
  
  × @inproceedings{dischinger-2008-satellitelab,
    author = {Marcel Dischinger and Andreas Haeberlen and Ivan Beschastnikh and Krishna P. Gummadi and Stefan Saroiu},
    title = {{SatelliteLab}: {A}dding Heterogeneity to Planetary-Scale Network Testbeds},
    booktitle = {2008 ACM SIGCOMM Conference (SIGCOMM '08)},
    location = {Seattle, WA},
    month = aug,
    year = 2008
  }
  ×

  Planetary-scale network testbeds like PlanetLab and RON have become indispensable for evaluating prototypes of distributed systems under realistic Internet conditions. However, current testbeds lack the heterogeneity that characterizes the commercial Internet. For example, most testbed nodes are connected to well-provisioned research networks, whereas most Internet nodes are in edge networks.

  In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of SatelliteLab, a testbed that includes nodes from a diverse set of Internet edge networks. SatelliteLab has a two-tier architecture, in which well-provisioned nodes called planets form the core, and lightweight nodes called satellites connect to the planets from the periphery. The application code of an experiment runs on the planets, whereas the satellites only forward network traffic. Thus, the traffic is subjected to the network conditions of the satellites, which greatly improves the testbed’s network heterogeneity. The separation of code execution and traffic forwarding enables satellites to remain lightweight, which lowers the barrier to entry for Internet edge nodes.

  Our prototype of SatelliteLab uses PlanetLab nodes as planets and a set of 32 volunteered satellites with diverse network characteristics. These satellites consist of desktops, laptops, and handhelds connected to the Internet via cable, DSL, ISDN, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular links. We evaluate SatelliteLab’s design, and we demonstrate the benefits of evaluating applications on SatelliteLab.

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• Characterizing Residential Broadband Networks. Marcel Dischinger, Andreas Haeberlen, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Stefan Saroiu. 7th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '07), San Diego, CA, Oct 2007.
  
  × @inproceedings{dischinger-2007-broadband,
    author = {Marcel Dischinger and Andreas Haeberlen and Krishna P. Gummadi and Stefan Saroiu},
    title = {Characterizing Residential Broadband Networks},
    booktitle = {7th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '07)},
    location = {San Diego, CA},
    month = oct,
    year = 2007
  }
  ×

  A large and rapidly growing proportion of users connect to the Internet via residential broadband networks such as Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) and cable. Residential networks are often the bottleneck in the last mile of today’s Internet. Their characteristics critically affect Internet applications, including voice-over-IP, online games, and peer-to-peer content sharing/delivery systems. However, to date, few studies have investigated commercial broadband deployments, and rigorous measurement data that characterize these networks at scale are lacking.

  In this paper, we present the first large-scale measurement study of major cable and DSL providers in North America and Europe. We describe and evaluate the measurement tools we developed for this purpose. Our study characterizes several properties of broadband networks, including link capacities, packet round-trip times and jitter, packet loss rates, queue lengths, and queue drop policies. Our analysis reveals important ways in which residential networks differ from how the Internet is conventionally thought to operate. We also discuss the implications of our findings for many emerging protocols and systems, including delay-based congestion control (e.g., PCP) and network coordinate systems (e.g., Vivaldi).

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• Monarch: A Tool to Emulate Transport Protocol Flows over the Internet at Large. Andreas Haeberlen, Marcel Dischinger, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Stefan Saroiu. 6th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '06), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Oct 2006.
  
  × @inproceedings{haeberlen-2006-monarch,
    author = {Andreas Haeberlen and Marcel Dischinger and Krishna P. Gummadi and Stefan Saroiu},
    title = {Monarch: {A} Tool to Emulate Transport Protocol Flows over the {I}nternet at Large},
    booktitle = {6th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '06)},
    location = {Rio de Janeiro, Brazil},
    month = oct,
    year = 2006
  }
  ×

  This paper proposes Monarch, a novel tool that accurately emulates transport protocol flows from an end host controlled by its user to any other Internet host that responds to simple TCP, UDP, or ICMP packet probes. Since many Internet hosts and routers respond to such probes, Monarch can evaluate transport protocols, such as TCP Reno, TCP Vegas, and TCP Nice, over a large and diverse set of Internet paths. Current approaches to evaluating these protocols need control over both end hosts of an Internet path. Consequently, they are limited to a small number of paths between nodes in testbeds like PlanetLab, RON or NIMI. Monarch's ability to evaluate transport protocols with minimal support from the destination host enables many new measurement studies. We show the feasibility of using Monarch for three example studies: (a)understanding transport protocol behavior over network paths that are less explored by the research community, such as paths to cable and DSL hosts, (b) investigating the relative performance of different transport protocol designs, such as TCP Vegas and TCP Reno, and (c) testing protocol implementations under a wide range of experimental conditions.

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