M-Lab: User Initiated Internet Data for the Research Community
2022 Phillipa Gill, Christophe Diot, Lai Yi Ohlsen, Matt Mathis, and Stephen Soltesz
Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform on which researchers have deployed measurement tools. Its mission is to measure the Internet, save the data and make it universally accessible and useful. This paper serves as an update on the MLab platform 10+ years after its initial introduction to the research community. Here, we detail the current state of the M-Lab distributed platform, highlights existing measurements/data available on the platform, and describes opportunities for further engagement between the networking research community and the platform.
Deprecating the TCP Macroscopic Model (ACM SIGCOMM 2020, Best of CCR, Aug. 2020)
2020 Matt Mathis
ESnet CI Engineering Brownbag - NDT and the evolution of transport protocols
2020 Matt Mathis
On 3/20/2020, M-Lab contributor, Matt Mathis, presented an [ESnet CI Engineering Brownbag](https://www.es.net/science-engagement/ci-engineering-brownbag-series/) on \_BBR and the evolution of transport protocols_.
Deprecating the TCP Macroscopic Model
2019 Matt Mathis, Jamshid Mahdavi
The TCP Macroscopic Model will be completely obsolete soon. It was a closed form performance model for Van Jacobson’s land- mark congestion control algorithms presented at Sigcomm’88. Ja- cobson88 requires relatively large buffers to function as intended, while Moore’s law is making them uneconomical. BBR-TCP is a break from the past, unconstrained by many of the assumptions and principles defined in Jacobson88. It already out performs Reno and CUBIC TCP over large portions of the Internet, generally without creating queues of the sort needed by earlier congestion control algorithms. It offers the potential to scale better while using less queue buffer space than existing algorithms. Because BBR-TCP is built on an entirely new set of principles, it has the potential to deprecate many things, including the Macro- scopic Model. New research will be required to lay a solid founda- tion for an Internet built on BBR.
Internet2 Tech Exchange - Bring NDT Back: Measurement Lab Modernizes NDT Server
2019 Chris Ritzo, Matt Mathis
The R&E network community using perfSONAR used to include the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT), a single stream performance measurement of bulk transport capacity. Many years ago, perfSONAR dropped support for NDT since its dependence on the web100 kernel library required running old, outdated, and hard to secure linux kernels. Measurement Lab (M-Lab) had the same problem, but has continued to host NDT as an Internet measurement service on our global server platform. Over the past two years, M-Lab developers have been working through the technical debt to migrate our platform to Docker containers, managed by Kubernetes, and concurrently have refactored NDT server, and developed reference clients for various languages and operating systems. The new NDT server is 'Docker-ized' and is based on WebSocket and TLS, uses TCP BBR where it is available, and is backward compatible with previous clients. M-Lab anticipates that. by the end of Q3 2019, all our servers worldwide will be running the new NDT version, managed by Kubernetes.
Pathdiag: Automated TCP Diagnosis
2008 M. Mathis, J. Heffner, P. O'Neil, P. Siemsen
Review of the pathdiag test, used to diagnose network performance problems commonly affecting TCP-based applications
