mPlane – Building an Intelligent Measurement Plane for the Internet

Alessandro Finamore

Politecnico di Torino and Narus Inc., Sunnyvale, California

Thursday, February 6
11:00 a.m., Lecture Hall

Abstract:

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. The talk will introduce the mplane architecture, its components and brainstorm about how to apply it to some specific use cases (monitoring Akamai and YouTube CDN).

Bio:

Alessandro Finamore received the MSc in computer engineering in 2008 and the PhD in Telecommunication Engineering in 2012 from Politecnico di Torino. His expertise and interests focus on Internet traffic analysis (including, and not limited, to study CDNs architectures, video streaming services, mobile applications, etc.), big data platforms and data mining. He is a post-doc at Politecnico di Torino but he is currently doing an internship at Narus Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA).