The FAB-Probe Project
Non-cooperative tools for measuring ADSL hosts.
Introduction
Most existing tools for the end-to-end characterization an Internet path require access to both end hosts of the path, which makes them difficult to deploy and use. The FAB-Probe Project aims at removing this difficulty, by developing single-ended techniques and tools for the characterization of a path without the active cooperation of the destination hosts. The focus is especially on ADSL links.
In a non-cooperative environment, where access is not available at the receiver, it is not possible to capture and analyze the probes at the end of the path. In the FAB-Probe project, the idea is to use probes that will be "reflected" back to the sender when the receiver is reached. To distinguish between forward and reverse paths, TCP ACK probes of various sizes are used, exploiting the fact that the packets sent back to the sender are always 40 bytes long RSTs independently of the size of the ACKs.[Top]
Tools
ABwProbe
ABwProbe measures the available bandwidth of non-cooperative hosts. It is a Probe Rate Model (PRM) tool based on Pathload. The algorithm has been designed to obtain fast estimates (tens of seconds) and innovative techniques are employed to filter cross-traffic on the reverse path. Although ABwProbe is general enough to be used on any Internet path, it has been tuned especially to measure the downlink available bandwidth of ADSL links. [Paper][Source code]DSLprobe
DSLprobe measures the capacity of non-cooperative hosts. By sending small packet trains at high rate and by employing sophisticated filtering techniques, DSLprobe accurately measures the capacity in few round-trip times. Compared to current methods used on broadband hosts, our approach generates two orders of magnitude less traffic and is much less intrusive. The tool has been tested on a large variety of ADSL links but should also work on other technologies as well. [Paper][Source code]FAB-Probe
FAB-Probe has been designed for large-scale available bandwidth measurements campaigns. It employs a new strategy to sample the available bandwidth efficiently, reducing the measurement time to few seconds. FAB-Probe is the natural evolution of ABwProbe, where accuracy has been carefully balanced with the running time. [Paper][Source code][Top]
Papers
ABwProbe
Non-cooperative Available Bandwidth Estimation towards ADSL links. [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]
D. Croce, T. En-Najjary, G. Urvoy-Keller and E. Biersack.
INFOCOM 2008, proceedings of the 11th Global Internet Symposium, April 2008
DSLprobe
Capacity Estimation of ADSL links. [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]
D. Croce, T. En-Najjary, G. Urvoy-Keller and E. Biersack.
Proc. of the 4th ACM CoNEXT conference, December 2008.
FAB-Probe
Fast Available Bandwidth sampling for ADSL links: rethinking the estimation for larger-scale measurements. [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]
D. Croce, T. En-Najjary, G. Urvoy-Keller and E. Biersack.
In Passive and Active Measurement (PAM) conference, Seoul, South Korea, April 2009.
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Source code
All tools are written in C language and are distributed under the GNU GPL license. Part of the code has been taken by Pathload, distributed under the GNU GPL license as well. Binaries are compiled under Linux 2.6.24 (gcc 4.1.2). Source code includes a precompiled version of the Libnet library, used for sending packets.
ABwProbe
[Source Code], 1.5 MB. [Binaries], 193 kB.DSLprobe and FAB-Probe*
[Source Code], 1.5 MB. [Binaries], 203 kB.*FAB-Probe requires the capacity to be known before starting the available bandwidth estimation process. It has thus been implemented on top of DSLprobe and the two tools are available together. They may be run separately as well (see options in the README file).
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Contact
If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please send an email to:
Daniele Croce eurecom fr ...with the appropriate punctuation! :)
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