TMA portal

The DIMES project at Tel Aviv University added last year a new model that enables the emission of long trains of packets towards some sink (say an ETOMIC box). The module is described in a Tridentcom 2009 paper, where it shows that trains can be sent evenly spaces from general purpose host machines running MS Windows. Train continuity violation at the source can be identified by a simple analysis of the time stamps on the packets.  We will also develop a bi-directional packet train by the end of 2009.

DIMES is interested in pushing the usage of the new module, for example by forming collaboration to study large scale bandwidth estimation of the Internet using packet pairs and packet train techniques.

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Several tools for the estimation of the available bandwidth have been proposed in literature. They differ in several aspects such as underlaying traffic model, filtering techniques, and tuning  parameters. As a consequence, they present pros and cons depending on the final purpose for which they are used (e.g. continuous monitoring or server selection), and they also differ in performance depending on the characteristics of the network under analysis (e.g. presence of wireless or DSL links).

COMICS research group of the University of Napoli has been working on capacity and available bandwidth estimation for several years.

The first works of COMICS research group aimed at estimating the performance of different tools [Botta05Perf], and at designing, implementing and testing a combined approach using different techniques in a sequential fashion [Botta05BET]. Moreover, they also worked on the estimation of the capacity of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks [Angrisani06].

Currently, COMICS research group is working on the final development and testing of a software platform that offers measurement services in a unified architecture. The platform is called UANM (Unified  Architecture for Network Measurement) and its main design goals are to:
- perform fair comparisons of different measurement techniques;
- conduct repeatable measurements;
- offer a uniform and highly abstracted interface for measurement requests;
- choose the best technique to fulfill the measurement requests based on the context;
- take care of concurrent measurements aspects such as mutual exclusion;
- become a common, open development and testing platform.

UANM has a distributed architecture, with instrumented daemons communicating in a peer-to-peer paradigm among themselves, and  interfacing with clients and third party probes in a client-server fashion. Through a communication API, the clients are provided with a high-level abstracted interface to the measurement tools. This translates into measurement requests that can be agnostic of the underlying technique and its parameters, as well as agnostic of the measurement context. All these information are transparently managed by the architecture, which takes care of choosing and configuring the tool (or tools) most suited to the particular context, also watching for mutual exclusion of the active measurement phases. Still high flexibility is retained, because it is also possible to issue detailed requests specifying the measurement method and the related parameters.

For more information see http://www.grid.unina.it/Traffic/uanm.php.

• [aceto2010uanm] bibtex
  G. Aceto, A. Botta, A. Pescapè, and M. D’Arienzo, "UANM: a platform for experimenting with available bandwidth estimation tools," in Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2010 IEEE Symposium on, 2010, pp. 174-179.
  @conference{aceto2010uanm, title={{UANM: a platform for experimenting with available bandwidth estimation tools}},
  author={Aceto, G. and Botta, A. and Pescapè, A. and D'Arienzo, M.},
  booktitle={Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2010 IEEE Symposium on},
  pages={174--179},
  issn={1530-1346},
  year={2010},
  organization={IEEE}
}
• [Angrisani06] bibtex
  L. Angrisani, A. Botta, A. Pescape, and M. Vadursi, "Measuring wireless links capacity," in Wireless Pervasive Computing, 2006 1st International Symposium on, 2006, p. 5.
  @inproceedings{Angrisani06,
  author = {Angrisani, L. and Botta, A. and Pescape, A. and Vadursi, M. },
  booktitle = {Wireless Pervasive Computing, 2006 1st International Symposium on},
  pages = {5 pp.+},
  title = {Measuring wireless links capacity},
  year = {2006}
}
• [Botta05BET] bibtex
  A. Botta, S. D’Antonio, A. Pescape, and G. Ventre, "BET: a hybrid bandwidth estimation tool," in Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2005. Proceedings. 11th International Conference on, 2005, pp. 520-524 vol. 2.
  @inproceedings{Botta05BET,
  author = {Botta, A. and D'Antonio, S. and Pescape, A. and Ventre, G. },
  booktitle = {Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2005. Proceedings. 11th International Conference on},
  pages = {520--524 Vol. 2},
  title = {BET: a hybrid bandwidth estimation tool},
  volume = {2},
  year = {2005}
}
• [Botta05Perf] bibtex
  A. Botta, A. Pescape, and G. Ventre, "On the performance of bandwidth estimation tools," in Systems Communications, 2005. Proceedings, 2005, pp. 287-292.
  @inproceedings{Botta05Perf, title={On the performance of bandwidth estimation tools},
  author={Botta, A. and Pescape, A. and Ventre, G.},
  booktitle={Systems Communications, 2005. Proceedings},
  year={2005},
  month={Aug.},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={ 287-292},
  }