Internet Measurement Infrastructure

Several projects with measurement infrastructures for monitoring Internet Traffic are currently in place. These utilize either public or private infrastructure. This page provides short summaries of those current measurement projects offering public reports. More details, including both comparisons and information specific to each project, are available either via links on the page, or by choosing one of the measurement infrastructure analysis sections from the pulldown menu below.

This list was compiled in 2004 and is no longer being maintained. This page is made available for historical purposes.

Public Measurement Infrastructure

CoralReef (CAIDA)
CoralReef is a comprehensive software suite providing a set of drivers, librarie s, utilities, and analysis software for passive network measurement of workload characteristics. These reports characterize workload on a high-speed link between UCSD and the commodity Internet.
I2 (Abilene)
Internet2 (I2) Abilene is an advanced backbone network that connects regional network aggregation points, called gigaPoPs, to support the work of Internet2 universities as they develop advanced Internet applications. The Abilene Project complements other high-performance research networks. Abilene enables the testing of advanced network capabilities prior to their introduction into the application development network. These services are expected to include Quality of Service (QoS) standards, multicasting and advanced security and authentication protocols.
IEPM - Internet End-to-end and Process Monitoring (SLAC/DOE)
SLAC/DOE/ESnet, High Energy and Nuclear Physics uses pingER tools on 31 monitoring sites to monitor network performance for over 3000 links in 72 countries. Monitoring includes many major national networks (including ESNet, vBNS, Internet2-Abilene, CALREN2, NTON, and MREN) as well as networks in South America, Canada, Europe, the former Soviet Union, New Zealand, and Africa. Many sites are also part of SLAC's related BaBar Wide-Area Network Monitoring effort.
MAWI (WIDE Project)
The Measurement and Analysis of Wide-area Internet (MAWI) Working Group studies performance of networks and networking protocols in Japanese wide-area networks. Sponsored by the Widely Integrated Distributed Environment (WIDE) project, MAWI is a joint effort of Japanese network research and academic institutions with corporate sponsorship.
Mantra
Monitor and Analysis of Traffic in Multicast Routers (Mantra) monitors various aspects of global Internet multicast behavior at the router level. Visualization snapshots and accompanying tables are updated every 15-30 minutes.
NIMI
NIMI is a project, begun by the National Science Foundation and currently funded by DARPA, to measure the global Internet. Based on Vern Paxson's Network Probe Daemon, NIMI was designed to be scalable and dynamic. NIMI scalability comes from its ability to delegate NIMI probes to administration managers for configuration and information and measurement coordination. NIMI is dynamic in that the measurement tools employed are treated as third party packages that can be added or removed as needed. For example, the MINC (Multicast Inference of Network Characteristics) measurement methodology for determinng performance characteristics of the interior of a network from edge measurements has been tested and validated using the NIMI infrastructure.
NLANR(MOAT)
NLANR(MOAT)-AMP Active Measurement Program
NLANR(MOAT)-PMA Passive Measurement and Analysis
NLANR's Measurement and Operations Analysis Team (MOAT) is creating a Network Analysis Infrastructure (NAI) to derive a better understanding of system service models and metrics of the Internet. This includes passive measurements based on analysis of packet header traces (link to PMA above); active measurements (link to AMP above); SNMP information from participating servers; and Internet routing related information based on BGP data.
Network Weather Service (NWS)
Distributed system to periodically monitor and dynamically forecast performance available from various network and computational resources over a given time interval. Service operates a distributed set of performance sensors (network monitors, CPU monitors, etc.) from which it gathers readings of instantaneous conditions. It then uses numerical models to generate forecasts of what the conditions will be for a given time frame. While the forecasting methods are general, the focus is on the ability to predict the TCP/IP end-to-end throughput and latency attainable from applications using systems located at different sites. Such forecasts are needed both to support wide-area scheduling of large scale computation, and by the metacomputing software infrastructure to develop quality-of-service guarantees. Further information on NWS can be found in these papers.
PPNCG Network Monitoring

The PPNCG (Particle Physics Network Coordinating Group) runs network monitoring processes on machines at several sites throughout Europe. Its goal is to gather end-to-end performance information for links of specific interest to particle physics researchers, and use the information to highlight problems and help the PPNCG to make recommendations to the appropriate bodies to optimise the networking available to the UK particle physics community. This project uses Traceping Route Monitoring Statistics.
skitter (CAIDA)
CAIDA's skitter tool is used to visualize topology and performance attributes of a large cross- section of the Internet by probing the path from a few sources to many thousands of destinations spread throughout the IPv4 address space.
RIPE
RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens) is a collaborative organisation open to organisations and individuals,operating wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond. The objective of RIPE is to ensure the administrative and technical coordination necessary to enable operation of a pan-European IP network. RIPE does not operate a network of its own. Currently, more than 1000 organisations participate in the work. The result of the RIPE coordination effort is that an individual end-user is presented with a uniform IP service on his or her desktop irrespective of the particular network his or her workstation is attached to.
Surveyor: Advanced Network & Services / Common Solutions Group R&E Network Measurements
Surveyor is a measurement infrastructure that is being currently deployed at participating sites around the world. Based on standards work being done in the IETF's IPPM WG, Surveyor measures the performance of the Internet paths among participating organizations. The project is also developing methodologies and tools to analyze the performance data.
TRIUMF Network Monitoring
Canadian national research facility uses perl scripts to trace paths toward nodes of interest to TRIUMF. Packet los summaries and graphs are generated daily from pins made at 10 minute intervals. Traceroute data is gathered four times daily. Network vizualization maps are generated from the traceroute data.
University of Oregon's Route Views Project
A collaborative endeavor to obtain real-time information about the global routing system from the perspectives of several different backbones and locations around the Internet. The Route Views router, route-views.oregon-ix.net , uses multi-hop BGP peering sessions with backbones at interesting locations (note that location should not matter if the provider is announcing consistent routes corresponding to its policy). Route Views uses AS65534 in its peering sessions, and routes received from neighbors are never passed on nor used to forward traffic. Finally, route-views.oregon-ix.net itself does not announce any prefixes.
WAND (Waikato Applied Network Dynamics) WITS (Waikato Internet Traffic Storage) Project
The WAND project aims to build models of internet traffic for statistical analysis and for the construction of simulation models. The project builds its own measurement hardware and collects and archives significant network traces. These are used internally and are also made available to the Internet research community. Traces are accurately timestamped and synchronized to GPS. Many traces are 24 hours long, some are up to a week long, and there are plans to provide even longer traces in the future. The WAND project is based at the University of Waikato in New Zealand with strong collaboration from the University of Auckland.

Private Measurement Infrastructure with Public Reports

Andover News Network's Internet Traffic Report
Measures "traffic index", response time, and packet loss by pinging many routers along "major paths" on the Internet. (traffic index - a score from 0 to 100 where 0 is "slow" and 100 is "fast", determined by comparing the current response to a ping echo request with all previous responses from the same router for past 7 days.)
Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index - (No longer available)
Assessment of average response time for accessing and downloading home pages of 40 Web Sites deemed most indicative to business users, as measured Monday through Friday every 15 minutes between 6 am and noon Pacific time by Keynote software measurement agents located in metropolitan areas of the United States.
MIDS Internet Average - (No longer available)
The MIDS Internet Average is a high-level summary of Internet performance measured from hosts all around the world. It provides one baseline against which more specialized Internet performance data might be compared, serving a similar role as the Dow Jones Industrial Average does in the financial world.
MIDS Internet Weather Report - (No longer available)
The MIDS IWR presents ongoing animated scans of macroscopic conditions across the Internet. IWR displays geographical maps that show ping-based RTT latency from MIDS offices in Austin, Texas to thousands of Internet domains worldwide. Data is currently updated every four hours, six times a day, seven days a week. Java applets support nonstop viewing and single-stepping frame by frame. Single GIF images are also available for each of the most current maps.
MIDS Matrix IQ Ratings Comparing Performance of Some ISPs - (no longer available)
MIDS monitors thousands of sites worldwide every 15 minutes to map the data flow of the Internet. Statistical analyses of this data to determine network performance form the basis for their Matrix Internet Quality (MIQ) products. Only a small fraction of the information capable of being provided by MIQ is used in this public ratings page.
NetSizer (Telcordia Technologies) - (No longer available)
NetSizer provides daily and monthly statistics on the size and growth of the Internet, including the number of computer hosts in the public Internet by top level domain and by second level domain. NetSizer also provides statistics on Internet penetration by country measured in terms of the number of hosts and Internet users. A separate report on the overall Internet quality presents results of active measurements to a set of about 100 URLs considered by Telcordia to be representative of the entire Internet. Sam Weerahandi was the contact for this tool.