MINER - A measurement infrastructure for network research

Network measurements often require the coordinated use of multiple tools on distributed vantage points. Without any form of supporting command and control system, the management and execution of a systematic measurement study is a tedious mission. In this paper we present MINER which seeks to simplify this task. MINER is a programmable measurement infrastructure that integrates existing measurement tools and provides its users higher-level services on top of them. It enables users to define measurement activities, schedule executions and retrieve their results. The services are accessible via a tool-agnostic and unified programming interface with which measurement applications can be developed. We discuss MINER´s requirements and design considerations and present a modular implementation that can be flexibly extended through plugins. Finally, we report on usage scenarios and directions for future work.