Passive Measurements
on the Abilene
Jörg Micheel
<joerg@nlanr.net>

Updates since Ohio (July ’04)
Completion of Indianapolis router instrumentation (Nov’04 – Feb’05)
Real time analysis application supporting operational and research requirements
Operational data analysis on IPLS-CHIN since December 2004 (live demo)
lambdaMON prototyping at CENIC/NLR
Passive monitoring getting closer to your network and users – watch this space

IPLS router instrumentation
All 12 links instrumented
Eight machines: three OC192MONs, one OC48MON, one 2OC12MON, one 2OC3MON,  two 2GIGEMON, CDMA time synchronization via Praecis Ct and TDS-24
Planned to stay there for the lifetime of the backbone
Took 2 ½ years of planning and preparation
Excellent support from Internet2 and Indiana GlobalNOC
Platform for a variety of research works

Slide 4

Network configuration

Real Time Analysis
Collaborative effort with University of Leipzig, Germany
Computing about one dozen parameters in real time at line rate, at 10 Gigabit links
Proprietary light weight protocol for data transfer across the network to central archive
RRD based storage/retrieval
Web based user interface, intervals of 5 minutes to one year
Optional JAVA interface
Experimental plug-ins: TCP state monitoring, P2P traffic measurements, IPv6 support, Abilene NMS support
Stress tests during Supercomputing 2004
Operational trials using IPLS-CHIN since December ‘04

Slide 7

Real time during SC’04 (1)

Real time during SC’04 (2)

lambdaMON prototyping (1)
Joint engagement with CENIC and National LambdaRail to build passive monitoring instrumentation for DWDM optical networks
Phase 1 (lab tests) done in October 2004 — successful
Phase 2 (field trial) scheduled for March 2005 at the CENIC Los Angeles node

lambdaMON prototyping (2)

Passive Internet Analysis Nodes
Based on the idea of POP instrumentation
Cost effective reconfigurable distributed passive monitoring facility
Service benefits to all US research networks – near ubiquitous
Please come and talk to us if you are interested in collaborating!

Acknowledgements
Matt Zekauskas, Rick Summerhill, Internet2
Caroline Carver, John Hicks, Indiana GlobalNOC
Klaus Degner, Klaus Mochalski, University of Leipzig, Germany
Dave Reese, Darrell Newcomb, CENIC
Jim Hale, NLANR/MNA, SDSC/UCSD

References
http://pma.nlanr.net/Sites/ipls-200411/
http://pma.nlanr.net/Special/
http://pma.nlanr.net/Special/sc04rt.html
http://pma.nlanr.net/lambdamon.html