As part of our network measurement and analysis activities on behalf of the National Science Foundation's HPC connection program, we are expanding the scope of our passive measurement activities to go beyond vBNS-only connections. This will, in collaboration with Internet2, create an opportunity for Abilene-connected Internet2 members and GigaPoPs to participate. The current funding allocates resources for approximately 25 more OCXmon monitors, likely a mixture of OC12 and OC3, ATM and Packet-over-SONET.
These monitors will become part of the NLANR Network Analysis Infrastructure (NAI): a network of passive and active monitors that provide engineering/operational support and network research opportunities to the high-performance networking community. They will be managed entirely by NLANR staff in San Diego; host sites do not have to learn how to build or run such a monitor, but are encouraged to participate in the analysis of the data. The latter may be particularly of interest to campus CS departments. Currently, the monitors take short traces several times a day. The traces only include packet headers (no user data) and get sanitized to protect IP address privacy considerations, before they are being made available to the community. Traces are available at http://moat.nlanr.net/Traces/ . Prototype analysis results can be obtained at http://moat.nlanr.net/Datacube/.
From time to time, and as resources permit, monitors may also be scheduled for longer traces to support site needs, for example to debug or tune an application.
Because these devices monitor user packets, multiple steps are taken to ensure user privacy.
As of September 1999, there are about twelve existing monitors that have been deployed over the course of more than a year, though principally located at vBNS access lines.
To apply for one of these monitors, please fill out the form.
We are interested in involving local personnel, both those involved in networking the campus (or gigaPoP), and faculty doing network research. Requests that include local contact information for potential users, both in operations (or network engineering) and research faculty, will be given some priority. Requests that include concrete plans for research and other collaborations will be given high priority. In addition, requests at "key" locations (e.g., close to an exchange point) will likely be given priority.
Within the HPC community and elsewhere, we view consistent passive monitoring an important part of the overall network measurement infrastructure that also includes active measurement, utilization statistics, and routing information. Passive monitoring will allow us to obtain a better understanding of the network workload, and as such be important to evolve the architecture and implementation of the environment we have been creating.
Comments, questions or suggestion can be made via the feedback form.