An extensible probe architecture for network protocol performance measurement

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of Windmill, a passive network protocol performance measurement tool. Windmill enables experimenters to measure a broad range of protocol performance metrics by both reconstructing application-level network protocols and exposing the underlying protocol layers' events. Windmill is split into three functional components: a dynamically compiled Windmill Protocol Filter (WPF), a set of abstract protocol modules, and an extensible experiment engine. To demonstrate Windmill's utility, the results from several experiments are presented. The first set of experiments suggests a possible cause for the correlation between Internet routing instability and network utilization. The second set of experiments highlights: Windmill's ability to act as a driver for a complementary active Internet measurement apparatus, its ability to perform online data reduction, and the non-intrusive measurement of a closed system.