A Platform for Unobtrusive Measurements on PlanetLab

TCP Sidecar is a network measurement platform for injecting probes transparently into externally generated TCP streams. By coupling measurement probes with nonmeasurement traffic, we are able to obtain measurements behind NATs and firewalls without alerting intrusion detection systems. In this paper, we discuss Sidecar's design and our deployment experience on PlanetLab. We present preliminary results from Sidecar-based tools for RTT estimation ("sideping") and receiver-side bottleneck location ("artrat").

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