NETI@home: A Distributed Approach to Collecting End-to-End Network Performance Measurements

摘要

NETI@home is an open-source software package that collects network performance statistics from end-systems. It has been written for and tested on the Windows, Solaris, and Linux operating systems, with testing for other operating systems to be completed soon. NETI@home is designed to run on end-user machines and collects various statistics about Internet performance. These statistics are then sent to a server at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where they are collected and made publicly available. This tool gives researchers much needed data on the end-to-end performance of the Internet, as measured by end-users. Our basic approach is to sniff packets sent from and received by the host and infer performance metrics based on these observed packets. NETI@home users are able to select a privacy level that determines what types of data are gathered, and what is not reported. NETI@home is designed to be an unobtrusive software system that runs quietly in the background with little or no intervention by the user, and using few resources.