New Article Introduces M-Lab to Research Community

Want a refresh on the who, what, and why of M-Lab? Read this intro to Measurement Lab and invitation to the research community to get involved, in the June ACM's Computer Communication Review available here. Authors Constantine Dovorolis (Georgia Tech), Krishna Gummadi (MPI-SWS), Aleksandar Kuzmanovic (Northwestern University), and Sascha D. Meinrath (New America Foundation) provide an overview of Measurement Lab’s (M-Lab) objectives, administrative organization, software, hardware infrastructure, currently available measurement tools and datasets, and invites the broader networking research community to participate in the project.

Here are a few highlights from the article:

M-Lab Infrastructure
M-Lab has been developed in conjunction with the PlanetLab Consortium and so it has much in common with the well-known PlanetLab platform. M-Lab differs from PlanetLab in two key ways, however: first, the scope of tools and experiments permitted to run on M-Lab is limited to active broadband measurements, open source tools, and open data mandates; and, second, M-Lab resource allocation policies are designed to avoid resource contention between different experiments that could detrimentally impact their accuracy.

Administration, maintenance, and access: Researchers and network scientists who are interested in running their tools on the M-Lab platform should contact M-Lab’s steering committee, which coordinates research on the M-Lab platform. Once granted access, researchers can login and run their experiments on M-Lab servers.

Current M-Lab Tools and Data
With 6 active tools spanning across a variety of applications, M-Lab conducts measurements between the user/client and M-Lab measurement servers to examine end-to-end performance characteristics along the entire path. Active M-Lab tools include Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT), Network path and Application Diagnosis (NPAD), Glasnost, Pathload2, ShaperProbe, and SideStream. For more information visit http://www.measurementlab.net/measurement-lab-tools.

All data collected through M-Lab is made publicly available in the public domain. You can currently access NDT and NPAD datasets through M-Lab’s public data sets and M-Lab is actively looking to expand its options for making the available data more accessible. M-Lab’s steering committee is working to ensure that data is made available as promptly as possible. Occasionally upon request, the M-Lab steering committee allows researchers to embargo their data briefly to enable them to have the first opportunity to analyze the information their tools collect. After a maximum of one year or when the researcher publishes a paper with findings from the corresponding data (whichever comes first), that data must be released publicly.

Get involved
Researchers can use M-Lab to a) expose their measurement tools and systems to a large number of users, b) validate their analytical and simulation models with data from real-world Internet paths, c) share and analyze datasets collected on M-Lab, d) avoid the administrative and operational overhead involved in managing a large-scale distributed server platform.

Get involved today by visiting http://www.measurementlab.net/getinvolved.