[sigcomm] Announcement: a new network measurement platform

[Michael Rabinovich]

We are pleased to announce the availability of DipZoom P2P network  
measurement infrastructure.   Unlike existing approaches that face a  
difficult challenge of building a measurement platform with  
sufficiently diverse measurements and measuring hosts, DipZoom offers  
a matchmaking service instead,  bringing together experimenters in  
need of measurements with external measurement providers.

Salient features of DipZoom are:

1. DipZoom is an open system.  Anyone can perform measurement  
experiments autonomously.  We seeded the system with over a hundred  
measurement points (MPs) on PlanetLab nodes.  Several residential  
measurement points are also available.

2. DipZoom is an extensible system.  While its current standard  
distribution offers wget, ping, traceroute, and nslookup  
measurements, anyone can add new measurements as plug-ins, and  
recruit participants to install these plugins on their MPs.

3. DipZoom offers a coherent view over the entire collection of  
measurement points, which are all accessible from any local computer  
with DipZoom installed.  The only restriction is that, in the peer-to- 
peer spirit, in order to run a DipZoom client, the computer must also  
offer measurements by becoming a DipZooom measurement point.

4. DipZoom offers both navigational and programmatic access to the  
entire platform.  For navigational access, there is a graphical  
DipZoom client that allows the user to browse available MPs, select  
the MPs according to a number of characteristics (platform, location,  
autonomous system), and  obtain measurements from those MPs.  For  
programmatic access, DipZoom provides APIs to script and run complex  
globally distributed measurement experiments from a local computer.   
The APIs are implemented by a Java class library and can be called  
from any Java application.  As a test of the usability of DipZoom  
APIs, students in the Fall'07 undergraduate networking class were  
able to perform a complex measurement experiment (investigating the  
quality of Akamai's server selection) in a matter  of days.

5. Utmost care is paid to security, including the rate limiting of  
requests to both any given measurement point and to any given  
measurement target.

DipZoom runs on windows, linux, and Mac OS platforms, and can be  
freely downloaded from http://dipzoom.case.edu/ .  The site also  
includes further details on the system and links to the mailing list  
and people involved.  Please send your comments to any of us.

We hope you will find DipZoom useful and fun.

Regards,
Misha Rabinovich.