A Passive Measurement System for Network Testbeds

Charles Thomas, Joel Sommers, Paul Barford, Dongchan Kim, Ananya Das, Roberto Segebre, Mark Crovella

Abstract: The ability to capture and process packet-level data is of intrinsic importance in network testbeds that offer broad experimental capabilities to researchers. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a passive measurement system for network testbeds called GIMS. The system enables users to specify and centrally manage packet capture on a set of dedicated measurement nodes deployed on links in a distributed testbed. The first component of GIMS is a scalable experiment management system that coordinates multi-tenant access to measurement nodes through a web-based user interface. The second component of GIMS is a node management system that enables (i) local processing on packets (e.g., flow aggregation and sampling), (ii) meta-data to be added to captured packets (e.g., timestamps), (iii) packet anonymization per local security policy, and (iv) flexible data storage including transfer to remote archives. We demonstrate the capabilities of GIMS through a set of micro-benchmarks that specifically highlight the performance of the node management system deployed on a commodity workstation. Our implementations are openly available to the community and our development efforts are on-going.