Measuring the performance and fairness of a shared network infrastructure

Presented by Rocky K. C. Chang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) [bio]

In this talk, we present a measurement system for monitoring the performance and fairness of HANRET: an educational network serving the eight tertiary institutions in Hong Kong.

We will present the measurement system design as well as some interesting measurement results collected over a year.

The measurement system is OneProbe: a new solo-active system that measures the quality of an end-to-end network path using normal TCP data packets. OneProbe uses the same TCP data probes to measure a number of path metrics-round-trip delay and delay jitter, forward-path and reverse-path packet loss rates, forward-path and reverse-path packet reordering rates, and forward-path and reverse-path capacity. By using data probes for measurement, OneProbe's results can accurately reflect the path quality experienced by data packets (that is, data-path quality). Besides, OneProbe measurement will not be easily tampered with by path intermediaries and malicious activities on the path, because the probe and response packets cannot be easily distinguished from normal TCP. The current implementation is based on HTTP and web service.