Quantifying Interference Between Measurements On The RIPE Atlas Platform

Thomas Holterbach , Cristel Pelsser , Randy Bush and Laurent Vanbever

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Abstract

Public measurement platforms composed of low-end hardware devices such as RIPE Atlas have gained significant traction in the research community. Such platforms are indeed particularly interesting as they provide Internet-wide measurement capabilities together with an ever growing set of measurement tools. To be scalable though, they allow for concurrent measurements between users. This paper answers a fundamental question for any platform user: Do measurements launched by others impact my results? If so, what can I do about it? We measured the impact of multiple users running experiments in parallel on the RIPE Atlas platform. We found that overlapping measurements do interfere with each other in at least two ways. First, we show that measurements performed from and towards the platform can significantly increase timings reported by the probe. We found that increasing hardware CPU greatly helped in limiting interference on the measured timings. Second, we show that measurement campaigns can end up completely out-of-synch (by up to one hour), due to concurrent loads. In contrast to precision, we found that better hardware does not help.

Publication Details

Publication Type
poster
Publication Date
April 2015
Published In
5th PhD School on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA)
Location
Barcelona, Spain
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1145/2815675.2815710

BibTeX Citation

@poster{Holterbach2015a,
	title        = {Quantifying Interference Between Measurements On The RIPE Atlas Platform},
	author       = {Thomas Holterbach and Cristel Pelsser and Randy Bush and Laurent Vanbever},
	year         = 2015,
	month        = apr,
	booktitle    = {5th PhD School on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis ({TMA})},
	address      = {Barcelona, Spain},
	doi          = {10.1145/2815675.2815710},
	url          = {https://tma-2015.cba.upc.edu/phd-school.html},
	abstract     = {
		Public measurement platforms composed of low-end hardware devices such as RIPE Atlas have gained significant traction in the research community. Such platforms are indeed particularly interesting as they provide Internet-wide measurement capabilities together with an ever growing set of measurement tools. To be scalable though, they allow for concurrent measurements between users. This paper answers a fundamental question for any platform user: Do measurements launched by others impact my results? If so, what can I do about it?

		We measured the impact of multiple users running experiments in parallel on the RIPE Atlas platform. We found that overlapping measurements do interfere with each other in at least two ways. First, we show that measurements performed from and towards the platform can significantly increase timings reported by the probe. We found that increasing hardware CPU greatly helped in limiting interference on the measured timings. Second, we show that measurement campaigns can end up completely out-of-synch (by up to one hour), due to concurrent loads. In contrast to precision, we found that better hardware does not help.
	},
	groups       = {Posters},
	keywords     = {RIPE Atlas Platform, measurement, interference}
}

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