PacketLab - An internet measurement framework for low-cost vantage point sharing

Vantage point sharing is a common and economical approach by Internet measurement community members to procure proper vantage points for measurement campaigns. Sharing, however, is not frictionless and suffers from three obstacles—lack of vantage point compatibility, low incentives to support new measurements, and varying experimenter trust levels—limiting scale. In this dissertation, we present the PacketLab Internet measurement framework to facilitate vantage point access collaboration among community members. We first describe PacketLab’s three-component design: a universal measurement endpoint interface, a certificate/program-based access control mechanism, and a measurement rendezvous mechanism, along with the design benefits, advantages over other sharing approaches, as well as our implementation of the framework that is readily available to the public. We then present an evaluation of the framework on measurement support, which is critical to the framework’s applicability to the community in accommodating community-interested measurements. To further support experimenters’ efforts in framework adoption, we also present a novel network access virtualization tool, pktwrap, which allows existing, unmodified measurement programs to communicate over a PacketLab vantage point to collect less timing-sensitive data, with partial support for network event delay data collection. With our positive evaluation results, readily available implementation, and a capable virtualization tool, we believe the PacketLab framework is a promising candidate for the Internet measurement community in future collaborative Internet data collection efforts.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Yan, Tzu-Bin

Contributors dc:contributor

• Levchenko, Kirill
• Wang, Gang
• Xu, Tianyin
• claffy, kc

• Internet measurement
• PacketLab
• Network measurement

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Tzu-Bin Yan

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129544

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129544