A paper describing the design, implementation, and deployment of BISmark, the testbed that we have built to measure and characterize home networks will appear at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) in June. The BISmark project began nearly four years ago as part of an effort to measure the performance of broadband access networks. Since then, the platform has matured and now supports a variety of experiments and systems, including algorithms to characterize home wireless networks to systems that accelerate Web performance. We are also actively supporting experiments from other research groups as well as other deployments (e.g., the PAWS project in Cambridge).
The BISmark project page has more information on the project (including past papers and project contributors), and a pre-print of the BISmark paper, to appear in June 2014, is available here.
BISmark: A Testbed for Deploying Measurements and Applications in Broadband Access Networks
Srikanth Sundaresan, Sam Burnett, Nick Feamster
School of Computer Science, Georgia Tech
Walter de Donato
University of Napoli “Federico II”
BISmark (Broadband Internet Service Benchmark) is a deployment of home routers running custom software, and backend infrastructure to manage experiments and collect measurements. The project began in 2010 as an attempt to better understand the characteristics of broadband access networks. We have since deployed BISmark routers in hundreds of home networks in about thirty coun- tries. BISmark is currently used and shared by researchers at nine institutions, including commercial Internet service providers, and has enabled studies of access link performance, network connectivity, Web page load times, and user behavior and activity. Research using BISmark and its data has informed both technical and policy research. This paper describes and revisits design choices we made during the platform’s evolution and lessons we have learned from the deployment effort thus far. We also explain how BISmark enables experimentation, and our efforts to make it available to the networking community.
NOISE 