| New measurement tools demonstrated |
| Tuesday, 19 May 2009 12:10 |
The OneLab research team at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), headed by Professor Javier Aracil, have demonstrated new developments in high-precision measurement tools available to users of the PlanetLab Europe testbed.
Usually, packet-tracking measurements are made in microseconds and below, using precise GPS clock references and ad-hoc hardware, which is expensive for large-scale deployment. However, the PREMON network driver, developed by Prof. Aracil and his team, was able to measure the time taken for a packet of information to travel from one machine to another over the internet in milliseconds. It is worth noting that this is a software solution, which is inexpensive and amenable for deployment in large measurement infrastructures. On the other hand, millisecond resolution is enough for many network monitoring applications. For enhanced resolution, the ARGOS card provides a resolution in the range of ten nanoseconds, with specialised hardware.   Left: ARGOS measurement card (based on the NetFPGA platform), developed at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) Right: PREMON driver installed on a SOM-PC, also developed at UAM The live demonstration was carried out simultaneously on machines located in Madrid and Paris. The PREMON driver has the advantage of being extremely low cost despite its precision results, as because it is installed on a normal server computer, it does not require specialised hardware, and also offers a choice of options. It can be used as a standard driver and accessed through the typical socket routines. The packet timestamp is relayed to the application layer by means of the standard kernel structures and can be used in general purpose monitoring software such as Wireshark. The team at UAM also presented a new high-precision network measurement card, ARGOS (pictured above), which for a minimal cost (for academic institutions, each card costs less than 300€, or 500USD) provides even more accurate packet tracking measurements. ARGOS provides a measurement resolution of tens of nanoseconds. Both the PREMON driver and ARGOS card make use of a GPS device to keep both measurement endpoints synchronised. This demonstration was part of several made to Project Officers and reviewers from the European Commission during the OneLab project's Technical Presentation Meeting. The meeting took place in the Paris offices of OneLab coordinating partner UPMC, in March 2009. J. Ramos, I. Gonzalez, S. López-Buedo, F. Gómez, J. Aracil (UAM). Demonstration: ARGOS Card + PREMON Driver. OneLab2 Technical Presentation Meeting. Paris (France): March 2009.  |
