Workshops
Workshop Background
Internet research critically depends on measurement, but effective
Internet measurement raises some big issues. There is increasing
awareness that the size and scope of the Internet calls for large scale
distributed network measurement. However to be viable, large scale
measurement must overcome a number of challenges. Passive measurement
raises significant privacy issues. And active measurement raises
serious concerns about network impact.
This workshop will bring together key members of the Internet
measurement community in an attempt to explore a community-oriented
approach to these problems. Our inspiration comes from the astronomy
and high-energy physics communities which have self-organized to build,
operate, and allocate the use of large, unique, and expensive
measurement platforms. We hope to explore whether the Internet
measurement community is ready for this challenge.
Our vision is that a community oriented approach may be sufficient to
address issues in large scale measurement such as privacy and network
impact. With respect to privacy, we hope to explore the issues
surrounding a facility that would "accept experiments" to be run over
full-packet capture systems. Each experiment would be examined in
advance through community mechanisms (eg, a review panel) to ensure that
the results, if released, would not violate privacy concerns. We seek
to explore whether a fundamentally new model such as this for passive
measurement could enable a dramatically more powerful set of measurement
experiments.
With respect to network impact, we hope to explore community mechanisms
for overseeing large-scale distributed active measurement. For example,
experiments involving many thousands of active probing hosts are now
being proposed. In the absence of community oversight these could
easily go awry with undesirable results for the Internet as a whole.
Since there are no barriers to performing such experiments, we hope to
find ways to facilitate them in a safe way, both via community review in
advance and ongoing monitoring during execution.
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)