pMeasure: A peer-to-peer measurement infrastructure for the internet

While the Internet grows in size and complexity, its timely and fine-grained measurements are increasingly needed. Although, a lot of efforts have been carried out in recent years to monitor the Internet, an united and systematic measurement infrastructure that is appropriate for measuring the Internet has never been established. In this paper, we describe pMeasure, a peer-to-peer (p2p) system that is capable to create a large number of measurement nodes on the Internet and to provide a synchronized and cooperative measurement system. The system can accept measurement tasks, locate required measurement facilities and fulfill the tasks subsequently. A prototype of pMeasure has been implemented, analyzed and tested on three operational networks. The experiments and further simulations indicate that measurement resources can be located efficiently and p2p-based measurements are very promising.