PacketLab is a universal internet traffic measurement abstraction that lowers barriers faced by both experimenters and operators of internet measurement infrastructures. Internet measurement has had a major impact on science and society broadly, from helping us in identifying network threats like botnets, to providing a factual foundation for discussing internet policy issues. This work aims to serve the needs of the entire network measurement community by developing a universal interface that simplifies network measurement and facilitates resource sharing between research groups. PacketLab will make it easier to share measurement resources, and this will broaden access to these resources by institutions that would normally not have the resources to develop and maintain their own measurement platform.
This project aims to answer several fundamental questions in network measurement including 1) how to express measurement experiments using a small number of measurement primitives; 2) whether experiment logic can be effectively moved off the endpoint conducting the measurement; and 3) how measurement platform operators can ensure conformance to their platform policies while encouraging resource sharing. PacketLab is built on two key ideas. First, it moves measurement logic away from the measurement endpoint to a separate experiment control server, making each endpoint a lightweight packet source or sink. Second, it provides a way to delegate access to measurement endpoints while retaining fine-grained control over how endpoints are used by experimenters, allowing research groups to share measurement infrastructure with each other with little overhead.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
