A Passive Measurement System for Network Testbeds

The ability to capture and process packet-level data is of intrinsic importance in network testbeds that offer broad experimental capabilities to researchers. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a passive measurement system for network testbeds called GIMS. The system enables users to specify and centrally manage packet capture on a set of dedicated measurement nodes deployed on links in a distributed testbed. The first component of GIMS is a scalable experiment management system that coordinates multi-tenant access to measurement nodes through a web-based user interface. The second component of GIMS is a node management system that enables

(i)

local processing on packets (

e.g.,

flow aggregation and sampling),

(ii)

meta-data to be added to captured packets (

e.g.,

timestamps),

(iii)

packet anonymization per local security policy, and

(iv)

flexible data storage including transfer to remote archives. We demonstrate the capabilities of GIMS through a set of micro-benchmarks that specifically highlight the performance of the node management system deployed on a commodity workstation. Our implementations are openly available to the community and our development efforts are on-going.