Historical Measurements Running on the Archipelago (Ark) Infrastructure

This page provides a listing of historical measurements and experiments conducted on the Ark measurement infrastructure. In addition to scheduled measurements, we provide users with access and tools to enable execution of ad hoc measurements from the command-line or via a web interface through the Vela Ark Topo-on-Demand Service.

Historical Measurements

  1. IPv6 Topology Discovery Techniques: Using Ark's topo-on-demand interface, researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School run experiments to conduct IPv6 topology discovery. The vast size of the IPv6 address space (2128 addresses) make random or sequential approaches impractical. These experiments target practical methods of dividing the address space to discover active subnets. A paper describing the results of these experiments were presented at the Passive and Active Network Measurement Workshop (PAM 2013).

  2. MERLIN: MEasure the Router Level of the INternet: In 2011, researchers at Université de Strasbourg, the Université catholique de Louvain, and Waikato University, ran alias resolution experiments with the probing tool, MERLIN. Run from an Ark monitor in San Diego as a vantage point, MERLIN takes advantage of mrinfo, a multicast management tool that silently collects all IPv4 multicast enabled interfaces of a router and all its multicast links toward its neighbors. Further, the group made use of 1.2 million IP addresses sourced from CAIDA's traceroute measurements conducted on Ark as destination addresses in the measurements to discover MPLS and fingerprint networks on the Internet. A paper describing the results of the experiment were published in the proceedings of the Conference on Next Generation Internet (NGI 2011).

  3. RIPE-NCC World IPv6 Day Measurements:

    The RIPE NCC performed ongoing measurements related to World IPv6 Day, which took place on 8 June 2011. As a part of this effort, they monitored many of the participating websites from a number of vantage points:

    • Nodes of the RIPE NCC Test Traffic Measurements platform;
    • Nodes of the Archipelago Measurement Infrastructure, kindly contributed by CAIDA; and
    • Nodes contributed by partners and other infrastructures, such as RIPE Atlas.
    • From these vantage points, our monitoring effort periodically checked:

      • DNS entries -- to check whether the World IPv6 Day participants had A/AAAA records;
      • RTT distances using ping/ping6;
      • Forward path discovery using traceroute and traceroute6; and
      • HTTP page fetches -- over IPv4 and IPv6 when available.

      For this event, we measured 60 participants from 53 vantage points, and executed 6,651,575 measurements between June 1-12, 2011.

    • Load balancer turnover and packet field sensitivity: Researchers with the WAND research group at the University of Waikato ran an experiment, conducted over approximately eight weeks, to carry out traceroutes using the Multipath Discovery Algorithm (MDA) in TCP source port, UDP source port and ICMP echo modes. The traces conduct several measurements per destination and investigate the possible existence of successor forwarding decision by fields outside the standard flow 5-tuple. The experiment also studies the efficiency of MDA analysis under different modes of flow ID selection.

      The target addresses were derived from prefixes provided by the Route Views Project. A selection of 400,000 pingable addresses were used to create smaller randomly selected address sets of 70,000 thought to be mid-path, router interfaces. These measurements ran during the summer in 2013. Publication of the experiment is still in progress.

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