ACM SIGCOMM '98 PROGRAM

An Extensible Probe Architecture for Network Protocol Performance Measurement
G. Robert Malan and Farnam Jahanian (University of Michigan)

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of Windmill, a passive network protocol performance measurement tool. Windmill enables experimenters to measure a broad range of protocol performance metrics by both reconstructing application-level network protocols and 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, the results from several experiments are presented. The first set of experiments suggests a possible cause for the correlation between Internet routing instability and network utilization. The second set of experiments highlights: Windmill's ability to act as a driver for a complementary active Internet measurement apparatus, its ability to perform online data reduction, and the nonintrusive measurement of a closed system.

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The referenced paper is in Computer Communication Review, a publication of ACM SIGCOMM, volume 28, number 4, October 1998. ISSN # 0146-4833.

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