Full-Day Tutorial: Internet Measurements: A Hands-on Introduction

Monday, August 22nd

Location

The tutorial will take place at Room Esmeralda 1.

Presenters

Tutorial Timetable

09:00 — 10:30

Tutorial (first part)
10:30 — 11:00

Coffee-break
11:00 — 12:30

Tutorial (second part)
12:30 — 14:00

Lunch break
14:00 — 15:30

Tutorial (third part)
15:30 — 16:00

Coffee-break
16:00 — 17:30

Tutorial (fourth part)

Motivation

The Internet is made up of a large set of networks, each one under the control of a different administrator, with no central plan for how they connect to each other. If we encounter poor network performance, we need to make measurements to figure out what is going wrong. Similarly, if we want to gain a scientific understanding of the network and its behavior, measurements are required. This tutorial looks at three areas of Internet measurements. In "network topology and routes", we see how to measure the network's structure, and the paths that packets take. The section on "connectivity, losses, and latency" describes how to test whether two points in the network are connected, and to learn how much time it takes for packets to travel from one to the other. For "bandwidth", we examine how we can determine the capacities of paths in the network, and how much capacity is available for users. This tutorial includes hands-on exercises, in which attendees measure from their own computers using the Fathom Firefox extension as well as from nodes in the PlanetLab Europe network, which is distributed around the Internet. An attendee following this tutorial will emerge with a good basic grounding in Internet measurement.

Outline

The tutorial will be divided in four parts:

General principles

Types of measurements
Sound measurement practices
Ethical issues
Measurement platforms
Lab: Introduction to PlanetLab Europe and Fathom

Network topology and routes

BGP updates
Traceroutes
Lab

Connectivity, losses, and latency

Ping
Connectivity
Losses
Latency
Lab

Bandwidth

Definitions of bandwidth metrics
End-to-end measurement approaches
Flooding
Advanced probing
Lab

Expected Audience and Prerequisites

The tutorial will be useful to researchers, students, and practitioners alike (engineers, network admins, developers of internet applications or services). As long as you have the sort of understanding of internet technology that would come from an advanced undergraduate course or a first Masters course in networking, you have the necessary background to take this course.

Attendees must bring their own laptops. We'll request that attendees install the Fathom Firefox extension beforehand. We will also create accounts in PlanetLab Europe for the attendees.

Biographies

Timur Friedman is on faculty at UPMC Sorbonne Universités (LIP6 and LINCS laboratories), seconded 2014-2016 to Inria Paris. His principal area of research is network measurements. He conducts research in network measurements and heads the PlanetLab Europe testbed.

Anna-Kaisa Pietilainen is a junior researcher at Inria Paris. Her research interests are in networked systems and applications, and network performance. She is the main developer of the Fathom Firefox extension.

Renata Teixeira is a senior researcher at Inria Paris. Her research interests are in measurement, analysis, and management of data networks. Renata is currently vice-chair of ACM SIGCOMM and member of the steering committee of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference. She has over ten years of experience in research and teaching Internet routing and measurements.

Together, Renata Teixeira and Timur Friedman are co-authors of the Mooc "Internet Measurements: a Hands-on Introduction", available on France Université Numérique. They are also co-authors, along with other colleagues, of the Paris Traceroute measurement tool.