NeTS: Medium: Collaborative Research: PacketLab: A Universal Measurement Endpoint Interface

PacketLab是一个通用的互联网流量测量抽象概念，它降低了互联网测量基础设施的实验者和运营商面临的障碍。互联网测量对科学和社会产生了广泛的重大影响，从帮助我们识别僵尸网络等网络威胁，到为讨论互联网政策问题提供事实基础。这项工作旨在通过开发一个通用接口来简化网络测量并促进研究小组之间的资源共享，从而服务于整个网络测量社区的需求。PacketLab将使共享测量资源变得更加容易，这将拓宽通常没有资源开发和维护自己的测量平台的机构对这些资源的访问。本项目旨在回答网络测量中的几个基本问题，包括1)如何使用少量的测量原语来表示测量实验；2)是否可以有效地将实验逻辑从进行测量的端点移出；3)测量平台运营商如何在鼓励资源共享的同时确保符合他们的平台政策。PacketLab建立在两个关键理念之上。首先，它将测量逻辑从测量端点移至单独的实验控制服务器，使每个端点成为轻量级数据包源或接收器。其次，它提供了一种授权访问测量终端的方法，同时保留了对实验人员如何使用终端的细粒度控制，允许研究小组相互共享测量基础设施，开销很小。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

PacketLab is a universal internet traffic measurement abstraction that lowers barriers faced by both experimenters and operators of internet measurement infrastructures. Internet measurement has had a major impact on science and society broadly, from helping us in identifying network threats like botnets, to providing a factual foundation for discussing internet policy issues. This work aims to serve the needs of the entire network measurement community by developing a universal interface that simplifies network measurement and facilitates resource sharing between research groups. PacketLab will make it easier to share measurement resources, and this will broaden access to these resources by institutions that would normally not have the resources to develop and maintain their own measurement platform.This project aims to answer several fundamental questions in network measurement including 1) how to express measurement experiments using a small number of measurement primitives; 2) whether experiment logic can be effectively moved off the endpoint conducting the measurement; and 3) how measurement platform operators can ensure conformance to their platform policies while encouraging resource sharing. PacketLab is built on two key ideas. First, it moves measurement logic away from the measurement endpoint to a separate experiment control server, making each endpoint a lightweight packet source or sink. Second, it provides a way to delegate access to measurement endpoints while retaining fine-grained control over how endpoints are used by experimenters, allowing research groups to share measurement infrastructure with each other with little overhead.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.