Leveraging bittorrent for end host measurements

  • Authors:
  • Tomas Isdal;Michael Piatek;Arvind Krishnamurthy;Thomas Anderson

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • PAM'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Passive and active network measurement
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Traditional methods of conducting measurements to end hosts require sending unexpected packets to measurement targets. Although existing techniques can ascertain end host characteristics accurately, their use in large-scale measurement studies is hindered by the fact that unexpected traffic can trigger alarms in common intrusion detection systems, often resulting in complaints from administrators. We describe BitProbes, a measurement system that works around this challenge. By coordinated participation in the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent system, BitProbes is able to unobtrusively measure bandwidth capacity, latency, and topology information for ∼500,000 end hosts per week from only eight vantage points at the University of Washington. To date, our measurements have not generated a single complaint in spite of their wide coverage.