This document describes the design and implementation of the test
traffic project. This project has been proposed as a new
RIPE-NCC activity in [1].
The project is similar to the project proposed in [2]
for a different community.
The goal of the project is to do independent measurements of
connectivity parameters, such as delays and routing-vectors, in the
Internet.
The general idea behind this project is shown in figure 1.
The local network of each Internet Service Provider (ISP)
can be divided into two parts: an internal
part, that deals with the traffic between the machines of the customers
in this network, and an external part, that deals with the traffic
between this and other service providers. This project focusses on
the external networks only.
Two of the parameters that determine
the network performance between two providers are:
the total bandwidth and the delay. The bandwidth is the number
of bits that can be transferred between two providers per unit of time.
The delay is defined as the time elapsed between the moment that a packet
leaves the network of one provider and the moment that the packets arrives
at its destination. Associated with these parameters is a routing-vector,
this vector describes how traffic travels from this provider to another.
In order to measure the delays and determine the routing, measurement-boxes
will be installed at each participating provider. These boxes collect
data. The data is then transferred to a central machine at the RIPE-NCC.
Here the data is processed and made available to the users of the networks.
The outline of the remainder of this note is as follows:
Section 2 discusses the measurements that we plan to use
in order to determine the network performance.
Section 3 gives an overview of the hardware and software
infrastructure needed for these measurements.
Section 4 shows how the data can be presented to both
experts and casual users of the Internet.
An important point is to prove that our measurements actually reflect
the performance of the network. Section 5 discusses
how we can verify our results.
Finally, section 6 discusses the implementation,
milestones and deliverables of this project.
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