Ontimemeasure: a scalable framework for scheduling active measurements

In order to satisfy and maintain service level agreements (SLAs), which demand high network availability and good network health, ISPs have started instrumenting their networks with network measurement infrastructures (NMIs) that are composed of dedicated measurement servers. Active measurements are frequently used in NMIs to regularly monitor network health and analyze the experience of end-user application traffic traversing the network. However, active measurements initiated by measurement servers need to be regulated. Unregulated active measurement traffic can cause an unpredictable negative impact on the actual application traffic. Also, running simultaneous conflicting active measurements on measurement servers could result in misleading reports of network performance. In this paper, we describe our active measurements scheduling framework called "OnTimeMeasure" that allows ISPs to regulate the amount of active measurement traffic injected into the network and also prevents conflicts in ongoing active measurements between measurement servers. OnTimeMeasure provides a simple scripting language interface to specify various measurement requirements such as physical topology of measurement server clusters, periodicity of the measurements, and properties of measurement tools. For a given measurement requirements script, OnTimeMeasure uses an efficient heuristic bin-packing algorithm to generate measurement timetables for orchestrating active measurements for a network involving multiple measurement servers, each hosting multiple measurement tools.