This paper covers the on-going research on MASTSproject. The project objectives are to set-up and exploit a trafficmonitoring system for the UKLIGHT international high capacityexperimental network. The proposed system will record data flowand topological information at a range of time scales (fromfractions of a second to years). It will make this informationavailable to the community as a web service and managementinterfaces. In this paper the focus is on development of simulationplatforms that enable testing the analysis algorithms and Webservices output

Haddadi, H

Mendes Rodrigues, E

Sacks, LE

English

UCL Discovery

Applications of GridProbe Technology for Traffic Monitoring on High-Capacity Backbone Networks Data-Link Layer Simulation Approach  H Haddadi, E Mendes Rodrigues, L E Sacks Electronic & Electrical Engineering University College London [hamed/mmendes/lsacks]@ee.ucl.ac.uk  Abstract:  This  paper  covers  the  on-going  research  on  MASTS project. The project objectives are to set-up and exploit a traffic monitoring system for the UKLIGHT international high capacity experimental network. The proposed system will record data flow and  topological  information  at  a  range  of  time  scales  (from fractions  of  a  second  to  years).  It  will  make  this  information available to the community as a web service and management interfaces. In this paper the focus is on development of simulation platforms that  enable testing the analysis algorithms and  Web services  output.  Keywords-component  Traffic  characterization, Network simulation, Web services I.  INTRODUCTION The  emergence  of  high  speed  internet  access  and government plans to push the broadband to homes and schools has increased the importance of core backbone IP networks. However the type of traffic on networks changes rapidly with the  development  of  new  technologies,  such  as  streaming audio/video  applications  and  peer-to-peer  networking.  Such new  applications  have  caused  rapidly  increased  the  traffic burden on core internet routers and the need to monitor the traffic  types,  which  had  not  been  fully  considered  in development  of  protocols  such  as  SNMP  and  PING,  has become a vital part of network architecture design. Recently there have been projects in the e-science framework to enable data collection on core activities on such high speed networks such as the IPMON[1] project for the Sprint IP Backbone and the Grid-Probe[2] project as a scalable monitoring platform for the GRID.  The MASTS project is a £1.2M EPSRC project to measure the  evolution  of  the  topology  and  traffic  in  and  around  the UKLight  Network.  UKLight  is  a  national  facility  in  UK  to support  projects  working  on  developments  towards  10Gbps optical  networks  and  the  applications  that  will  use  them.  It consists of a collection of Points-of-Presence (PoP) connected together via dark fibre. One important aspect of the UKLight is the fact that overall it is a switched system and there are no routers deployed. As a result of this, it acts as an Ethernet in reality  and  it  does  not  allow  standard  routing  protocols  and algorithms to be used for monitoring purposes.  The objectives of the MASTS project are [3]: ·  Develop  and  deploy  Grid  Probe  technology  on  the network ·  Develop  'back  end'  feature  extraction  and  data compression ·  Archive flow traces and statistics ·  Provide  real-time  views  on  specific  flows  for  other UKLight users ·  Provide access to archive data via Web-Services   II.  ARCHITECTURE OF THE  MONITORING PLATFORM Figure  1  displays  the  architecture  of  the  monitoring  and proposed analysis and web services platform.   Figure 1: System architecture of the MASTS network monitoring platform This work is conducted as part of MASTS project under an EPSRC grant. In  the  initial  phase  of  this  project  there  is  need  for  a simulation platform for the whole system. This simulation is based on the architecture of the MASTS monitoring system. Grid Probes are located at each Point of Presence (PoP) and they capture the packets at full rate using high speed line cards. This will then be analyzed using fast feature extraction algorithms, as opposed to pure packet and header dumping like  TCPDUMP [4],  to  avoid  extremely  large  file  storage needs. The interesting information is analyzed using a GRID of computers and presented in XML format to various Web services  interconnected  to  the  monitoring  platform.  The authors’  contribution  to  the  project  is  mainly  focused  on research  into  fast  data  compression  and  feature  extraction algorithms  and  the  Web  services.  However  the  physical synthesis of the Grid Probes is not complete at present and the  need  arises  for  a  simulation  platform  to  test  the algorithms  and  network  architecture.  This  simulation platform  should  have  characteristics  equivalent  to  the UKLight so that it can be ported to the Grid service engines once the hardware development is completed. III.  SIMULATION OF THE UKLIGHT NETWORK The  analysis  of  the  feature  extraction  and  compression algorithms,  alongside  with  traffic  pattern  monitoring, requires a configurable network which enables the user to set  traffic  models  and  data  rates  and  the  analysis  results must be able to verify the behaviour of the network switches and traffic loss models. This brings the need for a simulation platform  of  UKLight  network,  which  allows  various configurations  of  the  network  traffic  patterns.  Various simulation tools were available, including J-Sim [5], Iperf [6] and Network Simulator 2 (NS2) [7] but none of them produce realistic packets due to complexity of the packet generation. However, [NS2] is good at modelling the traffic at network layer and as this project has emphasis on IP traffic, NS2 was chosen to model the UKLight network. The output trace file includes various prototypes of routing information such as source  and  destination,  protocol,  timing  and  sequence numbers. The output trace file can then be fed into TCL and C scripts in order to append various Ethernet headers and fields  to  it  and  then  feed  the  results  into  the  analysis algorithms.  Figure  2  displays  the  architecture  used  in  the simulation environment.  Figure 2: Simulation protocol The simulations have the following steps: 1.  Store the trace file components into a C structure. 2.  Convert  the  structure  components  into  equivalent IP header and Ethernet MAC addresses. 3.  Compose  complete  Ethernet  frames  from  each individual simulation event using the above. 4.  Feed the output file into statistical programs. 5.  Produce information on loss, node traffic and link statistics and feed these into web services.  IV.  WEB SERVICES  The data generated by the simulation platform, as well as the real probe data, will be archived in a standard format and will be accessible through a number of Web services. The Web services are specified in WSDL [8] and thus, other GRID applications will be able to invoke the services functionality, which will include querying facilities for trace retrieval and access to analysed data. We are currently defining a suitable metadata system for capturing all metadata about trace files (e.g. how/where the traces were recorded) as well as network configuration, probe information, etc.  This metadata is being implemented  as  a  relational  database  (MySQL [9]),  to  be directly  accessible  through  Web  services.  The  aim  of establishing a well-defined metadata schema is to guarantee the long term usefulness of the data sets, which the MASTS project aims to achieve. A web-based user interface is also being developed to provide access to the simulation data (and later on to real data as well as analysed data), by invoking the Web services functionality. The Java Servlet technology [10] and the Apache AXIS SOAP processing engine [11] are being used.  V.  SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK The  use  of  simulation  platform  allows  set-up  and modification of different scenarios of the UKLight network traffic pattern and the results should be able to verify the behaviour of the system. Once this is completed, the analysis platform  is  going  to  be  ported  to  the  real-time  system  to enable acquisition and broadcasting of interesting details for the wider research community using the UKLight facility. REFERENCES [1]  Fraleigh et al: “Packet-Level Traffic Measurement from the Sprint IP Backbone” IEEE Network  [2]  A Moore et al: “Architecture of a Network Monitor”  [3]  L Sacks et al: “UKLIGHT Monitoring and Analysis at many scales” [4]  http://www.tcpdump.org/  [5]  http://www.j-sim.org/ [6]  http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/  [7]  The Network Simulator - ns-2: www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/ [8]  WSDL specification: www.w3.org/TR/wsdl  [9]  MySQL open source database: http://www.mysql.com/  [10]  Java Servlet technology: java.sun.com/products/servlet/ [11]  Apache AXIS: ws.apache.org/axis  

A Moore et al: “Architecture of a Network Monitor”

al: “Packet-Level Traffic Measurement from the Sprint IP Backbone”

Java Servlet technology: java.sun.com/products/servlet/

The Network Simulator -

UKLIGHT Monitoring and Analysis at many scales”

Applications of GridProbe technology for traffic monitoring on high-capacity backbone networks, data-link layer simulation approach

Applications of GridProbe technology for traffic monitoring on high-capacity backbone networks, data-link layer simulation approach

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