mPlane: an Intelligent Measurement Plane for the Internet

The Internet's universality is based on its decentralization and diversity. However, its distributed nature leads to operational brittleness and difficulty in identifying the root causes of performance and availability issues, especially when the systems involved span multiple administrative domains. The first step to address this fragmentation is coordinated measurement: we propose to complement the current Internet's data and control planes with a measurement plane, or mPlane for short. In this paper, we define the mPlane architecture. mPlane's distributed measurement infrastructure collects and analyses traffic measurements at a wide variety of scales to monitor the network status. The architecture is centered on a flexible control interface, allowing the incorporation of existing measurement tools through lightweight mPlane proxy components, and offering dynamic support for new capabilities. A focus on automated, iterative measurement makes the platform well-suited to troubleshooting support. This is supported by a reasoning system, which applies machine learning algorithms to learn from success and failure in drilling down to the root cause of a problem. This paper describes the mPlane applicability to several real-world distributed measurement problems, focusing in particular on the cooperation between Content Distribution Networks and Internet Service Providers to better orchestrate their traffic engineering decisions and jointly improve their performance.