Computer Science

Colloquium Details

Internet Topology Measurements for the OneLab Testbed

Abstract

The European Commission's OneLab project centers around the PlanetLab testbed, which allows networking and distributed systems researchers to deploy experiments at a global scale with a degree of realism unmatched by other testbeds. OneLab extends, deepens, and federates PlanetLab: extending PlanetLab into environments, such as wireless, beyond the traditional wired internet; deepening the ability of the system to monitor the underlying network; and creating a PlanetLab Europe that is federated with PlanetLab in the United States. This talk focuses on the deepening efforts, and in particular on two results in network topology measurements. The first concerns topology measurements made by numerous distributed agents, and the problem of redundancy in those measurements. We describe Doubletree, an algorithm that permits agents to cooperate in order to reduce such redundancy, and we describe the use of Bloom filters to reduce the communication overhead required for such cooperation. The second concerns the accuracy of the topology measurements themselves. We show how the standard traceroute tool systematically fails in the presence of load-balancing routers, and we describe our new tool, Paris traceroute, which avoids most of the measurement artifacts produced by standard traceroute.

Biography

Timur Friedman is a Maitre de Conferences (assistant professor) at Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris. He is visiting the University of Oregon Computer Science Department for the 2007-2008 academic year. He earned his Doctorate in Computer Science in 2001 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the Project Director for the European Commission's OneLab project, and Director of the emerging PlanetLab Europe.