The title of the paper describes the efforts of the authors to make Internet research more compatible with other science fields.
- Unlike other science areas, Internet researchers are faced with a dearth of real data, which keeps them from realistically monitoring the state and patterns of network traffic. This lack of understanding has led to many major investments being made in the dark, after getting misguided by businesses’ individual interests. Hence there is an immediate need to develop tools that make monitoring of Internet simpler.
- The measurement system Ark that is described in the paper has several useful features. It helps in easy development and rapid prototyping of a measurement idea, and hence indirectly helps the researcher devote more time to innovative ideas. Another important feature is the distributed measurement and coordination (aggregation of results) among several nodes in the experimental system.
- A very useful feature of Ark is that its coordination is based on tuple-space distributed shared memory. Ark provides simple interface and usage semantics to the user, who can use simple queries to get data on the dynamics behind ping, traceroute programs, RTT as a funtion of distance etc. The results are stored in the form of tuples.
One problem that I find is in the usage of distributed shared memory for storing data in tuple-space. DSM is known to have many problems like complex semantics, availability issues etc. Not clear from the paper whether the authors have addressed these issues.
It will be interesting to see the measurements from the largest set of IP topology data that the authors are currectly corlecting. Also, it will be nice to see if there are any substantial advantages of IPv6 over IPv4 based on the measurement data from te Ark tools developed.
