Internet2 2003 Annual Report
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Abilene Observatory: Providing Unique Access to Operational Networks
abilene.internet2.edu/observatory
The Abilene Observatory
supports the development of an integrated data archive of the
performance and network status information
collected on the Abilene Network. The
aim is to provide network researchers with
access to operational network data that is
not possible in a laboratory environment
or on the commercial Internet. The Abilene
Observatory project is part of the Abilene
Network upgrade completed in December
2003. In addition to data collected by Abilene
Network engineers, the Observatory provides
for the co location of equipment at Abilene
Network nodes for network experiments
and measurement servers developed by the
research community.
Data collection by Abilene engineers relied
on four network management servers (NMS)
located in the Abilene racks. NMS are standard
PC-type machines running a common
version of the UNIX operating system. In
general, data is collected locally and distributed
to other database servers that provide
a web services interface to the data sets.
Researchers can automate the process of
accessing the data through web interfaces,
simplifying the process of data acquisition.
Data sets available to the research community
include the following: Usage Statistics,
Flow Statistics, Routing Data, Latency
Measurements, Throughput Measurements,
Router Data, and Syslog Data.
More than nine research groups at Internet2
member organizations use data collected by
the Observatory, including:
- The Wisconsin Advanced Internet
Laboratory (WAIL): Flow sampling
and anomaly detection using Abilene flow data.
- Boston University Department of Computer
Science: Spatio-temporal network analysis.
- Network Research Lab at Case Western
Reserve University: The presence and incidence
of alpha flows in backbone links.
Two research projects have co located equipment
in the Abilene router nodes: PlanetLab,
a global project providing an overlay network
involving many different types of research
projects, and AMP (Active Measurement
Project), providing latency information
between large numbers of machines across
the network.
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