INDUSTRY

In a few short years, people and businesses have become dependent on their internet connection, to the point where if that connection even slows down, it is a major issue. Yet how do you measure your internet connection’s performance? Actually, in any number of ways which have now been catalogued. Organizations managing high traffic volumes have until now been forced to rely on the assurances of their provider, rather than being able to use a widely-understood and standard measurement method. This is the purpose of the EU's IST project MOME, to build the knowledge and resources for such internet performance measurement. MOME aimed to develop a publicly-accessible data repository on the tools and data used for internet performance measurement. The project is completing at the end of March 2006, and already has accessible online a public database of IP (Internet Protocol) performance-measurement tools and data. “We looked at around 400 tools in total,” says project coordinator Felix Strohmeier of Salzburg Research in Austria. “These were refined down to 121 tools, which are described in the database together with the links to access them.” The tools database contains links to publicly-available data repositories, he says, stressing that many of the tools are freely available together with their source code. “What we have produced is a kind of online catalogue, where you can find the tool you need for a specific purpose, for example how to examine ‘denial of service’ attacks.” MOME’s IP measurement tools database currently contains information on some 66 open-source tools, 19 commercially-available programs and seven methods that do not make the source code available. For the remaining 29 tools listed in the database, source code availability is not specified. Strohmeier emphasises the contribution made by project participants to the standardisation bodies. “We have been very active in the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force, an open international community concerned with the evolution of the internet], bringing the results from a number of IST projects into what is the main engineering body for internet protocol.” While the MOME project itself is finishing, Salzburg Research intends to maintain the site and the open-to-all online database together with three of the project partners, says Strohmeier. Users are also able to add comments on any of the tools, once they have registered (which is free). MOME was the first EU research project in this area and therefore something of a European pioneer. The US-based CAIDA research association, at the San Diego Supercomputing Center in California, has worked in this area of IP measurement for around ten years, and has now decided to deploy its own database of measurement tools, prompted in part at least by the cooperation and contact with MOME.