The ubiquity of Internet access, and the wide
variety of Internet-enabled devices and applications, have made the Internet a
principal pillar of the Information Society. Decentralized and diverse, the
Internet is resilient and universal. However, its distributed nature leads to
operational brittleness and difficulty in identifying and tracking the root
causes of performance and availability issues. The first step to improve this
situation is measurement: illuminating the currently obscure dynamics of the
Internet.
To address this, we advocate a measurement
plane, or mPlane alongside the Internet's data and control planes. mPlane
consists of a Distributed Measurement Infrastructure to perform active, passive
and hybrid measurements; it operates at a wide variety of scales and
dynamically supports new functionality. A Repository and Analysis layer
collects, stores, and analyses the collected data via parallel processing and
data mining. Finally, an Intelligent Reasoner iteratively drills down into the
cause of an evidence, determining the conditions leading to given issues, and
supporting the understanding of problem origins.
By enabling pervasive measurement throughout
the Internet, mPlane benefits everyone: ISPs get a fine-grained picture of the
network status, empowering effective management and operation. Application
providers gain powerful tools for handling performance issues of their
application. Regulators and end-users can verify adherence to SLAs, even when
these involve many parties. Customers of all kinds can objectively compare
network performance, improving competition in the market. mPlane will
significantly advance the state of the art in Internet measurement, from
innovative probe technology to intelligent algorithms for distributed data
analysis. The development of the Reasoner is a key result that will allow
structured, iterative, automated analysis. An emphasis on open, standard
interfaces will speed adoption and increase the impact of the project.
