What users perceive as the Internet is often dominated by the "last mile? and increasingly the "last meter" that is the performance provided by their home network, local network equipment, and Internet Service Provider. Failures, outages, and limitations may arise from a variety of sources, including non-compliant or misconfigured middleboxes, deliberate ISP manipulations, and overbuffered access equipment. This project pursues three inter-related thrusts toward facilitating user-centric network measurement tools and techniques that develop an end-to-end view of how users actually experience the Internet.
The user's primary interface to the Internet is the web browser -- a potentially powerful and ubiquitous measurement platform. The project's first thrust, termed Fathom, will develop a set of new browser extensions that enable comprehensive from-the-browser measurement, including automatic failure-debugging tools. Further, the Fathom API will promote adoption and innovation by allowing web developers to embed arbitrary diagnostics or performance analysis code into their own websites.
The second thrust is to extend Fathom to the mobile space to better understand how mobile access affects and influences user experience. Mobile devices now define the Internet for a large cohort of users, yet access via these networks is particularly prone to manipulation and control. Fathom mobile will enable a broad suite of active mobile network measurements.
Finally, the project seeks to inform future large-scale measurement platforms, especially those utilizing customer premise equipment. As such equipment becomes more powerful and widely deployed, it represents an unparalleled opportunity for large-scale measurement research. This thrust will define the architecture to support, secure, and multiplex active measurement experiments that utilize end-user infrastructure.
It is the last mile and the last meter that define the Internet for most users. This proposal involves a comprehensive effort to measure the edge of the Internet, as this vantage point is often the most fundamental source of limitations on the user's Internet connection. This measurement program is comprehensive, encompassing new tools, enhancing existing well-validated tools, and deploying a thousand persistent measurement nodes within users'networks.
This work will enable significant insight into how the Internet actually operates. Both users and researchers will be able to test connections quickly and robustly for problems and limitations. Further, the project will enable tools and infrastructure that other researchers can use to further their own efforts.
