Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
451206 | Computer Networks | 2012 | 14 Pages |
We propose a platform for the rapid prototyping of active measurement tools to collect network characteristics. Our proposal, named FLAME (Flexible Lightweight Active Measurement Environment), allows the prototyping of active measurement tools that depend or not on cooperative destination nodes. FLAME provides its users with basic active measurement primitives—corresponding to basic building blocks—upon which sophisticated active measurement tools can be prototyped quickly, practically, and efficiently through scripts in the Lua scripting language. This platform is based on the distributed deployment of measurement agents in some network nodes. These agents can send and receive probes in response to Lua scripts sent by a user console. Such agents also publish the measurement data in a standardized way in a repository that a central manager keeps, thus simplifying the management and analysis of such data. We validate the FLAME platform as well as show its flexibility and accuracy through experiments on a local testbed and also on Planet-lab. We also evaluate the proposed platform as compared to previous work in terms of the easing of development due to prototype scripting as well as the achieved memory footprint. In conclusion, we discuss different possibilities for further developments built upon the basic functionality of the proposed platform.