An extensible probe architecture for network protocol performance measurement

Abstract

This paper describes the architecture, implementation, and application of Windmill, a passive network protocol performance measurement tool. Windmill enables experimenters to measure a broad range of protocol performance metrics both by reconstructing application-level network protocols and by exposing the underlying protocol layers' events. Windmill is split into three functional components: a dynamically compiled Windmill Protocol Filter (WPF), a set of abstract protocol modules, and an extensible experiment engine. To demonstrate Windmill's utility, we present the results from several experiments. The first set of experiments validates a possible cause for the correlation between Internet routing instability and network bandwidth usage. The second set of experiments highlights Windmill's ability to act as a driver for a complementary active Internet measurement infrastructure, its ability to perform online data reduction, and the non-intrusive measurement of a closed system. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/34551/1/557_ftp.pd