Publications

Example Publication with M-Lab Contributors

2024

Matt Mathis, Stephen Soltesz, Chris Ritzo

This is an example showing how to link publications to people in the people collection.

M-Lab: User Initiated Internet Data for the Research Community

2022

Phillipa Gill, Christophe Diot, Lai Yi Ohlsen, Matt Mathis, and Stephen Soltesz

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

Blog Posts

Measurement Lab publishes new dataset of NDT7 measurements

A new dataset of ndt7 measurements is now available in BigQuery, offering access to measurements from a set of servers whose data had not been previously published.

DataBigqueryNDT7

By Matt Mathis, Roberto D'Auria, Nathan Kinkade, Pavlos Sermpezis, Melissa Newcomb

July 15, 2025

Release notes for Unified Views with exposed Row Filters

Monday August 15th we will be updating the NDT unified views to provide researchers with access to the row filter logic used to exclude rows that are not believed to be representative measurements of network performance. This change enables interested researchers to better understand MLab’s data ...

BigqueryResearchData

By Matt Mathis

August 5, 2022

Evolution of NDT

NDT measures "bulk transport capacity": the maximum date rate that TCP can reliably deliver data using the unreliable IP protocol over an end-to-end Internet path. TCP's goal is to send data at exactly the optimal rate for the network, containing just the right mix of new data and retransmissions...

NDTNDT7Research

By Lai Yi Ohlsen, Matt Mathis

August 5, 2020

Migrating NDT clients to ndt7

Following the [general availability of the ndt7 protocol][ndt7intro], we will be working with NDT client integrators to support their migration to ndt7. As they do, the NDT dataset will shift from predominantly ndt5 to predominantly ndt7. As part of assessing our readiness for this larger effort,...

NDTNDT7Research

By Lai Yi Ohlsen, Chris Ritzo, Matt Mathis

July 24, 2020

Introducing ndt7

The new ndt7 protocol for the [Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT)][ndt] is now generally available on the M-Lab platform. Since 2009, NDT has been the premier TCP performance measurement service test hosted by M-Lab. During its history on the platform, NDT has produced the largest te...

NDTNDT7Research

By Lai Yi Ohlsen, Matt Mathis

July 22, 2020