An experimentation platform for the Internet's edge

Fabián E. Bustamante is an associate professor of computer science in the EECS department at Northwestern University. He joined Northwestern in 2002, after receiving his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the measurement, analysis and design of Internet-scale distributed systems and their supporting infrastructure. Fabián is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER award and the E.T.S. Watson Fellowship Award from the Science Foundation of Ireland, and a senior member of both the ACM and the IEEE. He currently serves in the editorial boards of IEEE Internet Computing and the ACM SIGCOMM CCR, the Steering Committee for IEEE P2P (as chair), and the External Advisory Board for the mPlane initiative. Fabián is also the general co-chair for the ACM SIGCOMM 2014 to be held in Chicago. For more detailed information and a list of publications, please visit: http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu

I argue that at its root, the problem is one of incentives. Today's platforms build on the assumption that the goals of experimenters and those hosting the platform are the same. As much of the Internet growth occur in residential broadband and mobile networks, this no longer holds.

In this talk, I will present Dasu, a measurement experimentation platform for the Internet's edge that explicitly aligns the objectives of the experimenters with those of the users hosting the platform. Dasu is designed to support both network measurement experimentation and broadband characterization. Dasu has been publicly available since mid 2010 and has been adopted by over 95,000 users, across 150 countries. I will then illustrate the value of Dasu's unique perspective with some of the ongoing projects and collaboration already taking advantage of it.