Resource management in an active measurement service

Many network services such as voice, video, and collaborative applications require an informed view of network characteristics for effective operation. Sharing a network measurement service across multiple applications can significantly reduce measurement overhead, and remove the burden of performing network measurements from individual applications. To be effectively shared, a network measurement service must provide a variety of measurements to applications on-demand, including end-to-end available bandwidth, delay, and loss. We propose such a service, with a focus on quantifying and bounding the impact of active measurements on the network resources being measured. Resource bounds are necessary for wide-scale deployment, since not all users of the service can be trusted. The service informs applications of how service bounds affect their measurements. We introduce methods to characterize the behavior of active measurements for use in admission control and scheduling decisions. We evaluate our methods in experiments under realistic scenarios on the Emulab testbed.