An extensible probe architecture for network protocol performance measurement

  • Authors:
  • David Watson;G. Robert Malan;Farnam Jahanian

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, 1301 Beal Ave., Ann Arbor, MI;Arbor Networks, 625 E. Liberty Street, Ann Arbor, MI;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, 1301 Beal Ave., Ann Arbor, MI

  • Venue:
  • Software—Practice & Experience
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

This paper describes the architecture, implementation, and application of Windmill, a passive network protocol performance measurement tool. Windmill enables experimenters to measure a broad range of protocol performance metrics both by reconstructing application-level network protocols and by exposing the underlying protocol layers' events. Windmill is split into three functional components: a dynamically compiled Windmill Protocol Filter (WPF), a set of abstract protocol modules, and an extensible experiment engine. To demonstrate Windmill's utility, we present the results from several experiments. The first set of experiments validates a possible cause for the correlation between Internet routing instability and network bandwidth usage. The second set of experiments highlights Windmill's ability to act as a driver for a complementary active Internet measurement infrastructure, its ability to perform online data reduction, and the non-intrusive measurement of a closed system.