GENI / FIRE Collaboration Workshop, September 2015, Session 6: Monitoring

Session chairs

• Scott Kirkpatrick
• Jim Griffioen

Session Summary

The session was separated into three parts. We had thought of them as first, monitoring the testbed networks we had heard about in the rest of the program, studying clouds, clusters and slices connecting them, then second monitoring issues in wireless, but new technology testbeds and high bandwidth smartphones serving to observe networks, and third, monitoring the internet from end to end. To accommodate some speakers’ travel schedules, we held the session in the order, topics 2, 3, then 1.

The discussion of wireless covered experimental design and protocols as seen in the iMinds testbeds, where the Wishfull project will make possible much more flexible experimental control, but the classic issue of the need for very controlled experiments to reproducibly characterize a technology in its very early stages remains. 5G, although an important goal, remains imperfectly specified and lacking in hardware to test. Interference effects that will become important as spectrum is increasingly shared among different technologies are observed and will be of interest. The second talk in the session, about the FCC’s comittment to transparency and efforts to put as many as 100,000 mobile applications performing standard edge internet performance efforts in the field to attain transparency, was disappointing. The FCC is still not completely through their process of determining robustness of their results and a privacy exposure-free means of disseminating them. They still hope to release a report of results by city and raw data sets for public inspection “soon,” but this would appear to not be likely until next year.

In the end-to end session, AMIS, a hardware and software platform for measurement of longer flows (>5 min) with modern privacy primitives ranging from full encryption to differential privacy (controlled noise). was described. Capturing and sharing information from sensor networks was covered as a component that will be architected and implemented as part of a standard substrate built with a city’s cooperation in a new project, EMBERS, and made available through open source mechanisms for more general use. Congestion in the internet has been claimed to be a non-problem, but studies done at M-Lab which compare RTTs and download performance from content sources in multiple eyeball ISP over extended periods of time show that in fact there are frequent and extended anomalies. Their methods are simple, and can be easily extended to include GENI clusters as participants in the measurement constellation. Finally, data captured for a month at a time in several cities from a widely distributed smartphone app was shown to provide the most extensive coverage of the internet’s edge to date. For example, 50,000 unique (anonymized) Android phones contributed measurements in the LA basin, and these could be interpreted to show difference in loading or contention at different times of day between applications deriving their data over distinct paths in the Internet. The discussion diverged briefly into a very animated discussion of the ethics of using so many people’s personal activities as part of an aggregated measurement tool.

Presentations

Monitoring Wireless Infrastructure

Discussion leader: Ivan Seskar

Author(s)	Title	Presentation
Ingrid Moerman	Emphasizing 5G Systems Measurement	slides​
James Miller	Measuring Broadband to the Sidewalk	slides​

Monitoring the Internet as a Whole

Discussion leader: Scott Kirkpatrick

Author(s)	Title	Presentation
Yan Luo	Privacy Preserving Network Measurement	slides​
Timur Friedman	Smart Cities	slides​
Collin Anderson	Internet Misbehavior as Seen from M-Lab	slides​
Scott Kirkpatrick	Crowd-sourced Data Demo	slides​

Monitoring Testbed Networks, Clouds, Clusters, and Slices

Discussion leader: Jim Griffioen

Author(s)	Title	Presentation
Mike Zink	Power and Temperature Measurement Infrastructure for CloudLab	slides​
Yahya Al-Hazmi	Monitoring Ontologies -- Demo	slides​
Brecht Vermeulen & Chrysa Papagianni	Facility Monitoring for Federations and Measuring Reputation in Testbeds	slides​
Dana Petcu	Monitoring in Multi-clouds	slides​
Bartek Belter	Monitoring of Multi-domain Slices in FELIX	slides​
Lucas Nussbaum	Kwapi Monitor for GRID 5000	slides​
Jim Griffioen	Monitoring Experiments vs Testbeds	slides​