A network measurement architecture for adaptive applications

The quality of network connectivity between a pair of Internet hosts can vary greatly. Adaptive applications can cope with these differences in connectivity by choosing alternate representations of objects or streams or by downloading the objects from alternate locations. In order to effectively adapt, applications must discover the condition of the network before communicating with distant hosts. Unfortunately, the ability to predict or report the quality of connectivity is missing in today's suite of Internet services. To address this limitation, we have developed SPAND (shared passive network performance discovery), a system that facilitates the development of adaptive network applications. In each domain, applications make passive application specific measurements of the network and store them in a local centralized repository of network performance information. Other applications may retrieve this information from the repository and use the shared experiences of all hosts in a domain to predict future performance. In this way, applications can make informed decisions about adaptation choices as they communicate with distant hosts. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the SPAND architecture and implementation. We show how the architecture makes it easy to integrate new applications into our system and how the architecture has been used with specifics types of data transport. Finally, we describe LookingGlass, a WWW mirror site selection tool that uses SPAND. LookingGlass meets the conflicting goals of collecting passive network performance measurements and maintaining good client response times. In addition, LookingGlass's server selection algorithms based on application level measurements perform much better than techniques that rely on geographic location or route metrics.

[1]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  SPAND: Shared Passive Network Performance Discovery , 1997, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[2]  Andrew H. Mutz,et al.  Transparent Content Negotiation in HTTP , 1998, RFC.

[3]  Michael F. Schwartz,et al.  Locating nearby copies of replicated Internet servers , 1995, SIGCOMM '95.

[4]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Measurements and analysis of end-to-end Internet dynamics , 1997 .

[5]  Ellen W. Zegura,et al.  A novel server selection technique for improving the response time of a replicated service , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98.

[6]  Margo I. Seltzer,et al.  The case for geographical push-caching , 1995, Proceedings 5th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-V).

[7]  Peter A. Dinda,et al.  Performance characteristics of mirror servers on the Internet , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[8]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Modeling TCP throughput: a simple model and its empirical validation , 1998, SIGCOMM '98.

[9]  Van Jacobson,et al.  A tool to infer characteristics of internet paths , 1997 .

[10]  Matthew Mathis,et al.  The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm , 1997, CCRV.

[11]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  BENEFITS OF TRANSPARENT CONTENT NEGOTIATION IN HTTP , 1998 .

[12]  Richard Wolski,et al.  Forecasting network performance to support dynamic scheduling using the network weather service , 1997, Proceedings. The Sixth IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (Cat. No.97TB100183).

[13]  Arthur L. Liestman,et al.  A survey of gossiping and broadcasting in communication networks , 1988, Networks.

[14]  Eric A. Brewer,et al.  Cluster-based scalable network services , 1997, SOSP.

[15]  SemkeJeffrey,et al.  The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm , 1997 .

[16]  Steven McCanne,et al.  An application level video gateway , 1995, MULTIMEDIA '95.

[17]  Seth Copen Goldstein,et al.  Active messages: a mechanism for integrating communication and computation , 1998, ISCA '98.

[18]  Paul Francis,et al.  An architecture for a global Internet host distance estimation service , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[19]  Mark Crovella,et al.  Dynamic Server Selection using Bandwidth Probing in Wide-Area Networks , 1996 .

[20]  Steven McCanne,et al.  Receiver-driven layered multicast , 1996, SIGCOMM '96.

[21]  David Wetherall,et al.  Towards an active network architecture , 1996, CCRV.

[22]  Steven McCanne,et al.  The BSD Packet Filter: A New Architecture for User-level Packet Capture , 1993, USENIX Winter.

[23]  Brian Kantor,et al.  Network News Transfer Protocol , 1986, RFC.

[24]  Paul Barford,et al.  Measuring Web performance in the wide area , 1999, PERV.

[25]  Peter B. Danzig,et al.  Harvest: A Scalable, Customizable Discovery and Access System , 1994 .