skip to main content
10.1145/3152434.3152436acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescommConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

FreeLab: A Free Experimentation Platform

Published: 30 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

As researchers, we are aware of how hard it is to obtain access to vantage points in the Internet. Experimentation platforms are useful tools, but they are also: 1) paid, either via a membership fee or by resource sharing, 2) unreliable, nodes come and go, 3) outdated, often still run on their original hardware and OS. While one could build yet-another platform with up-to-date and reliable hardware and software, it is hard to imagine one which is free. This is the goal of this paper: we set out to build FreeLab, a free experimentation platform which also aims to be reliable and up-to-date. The key idea behind FreeLab is that experiments run directly at its user machines, while traffic is relayed by free vantage points in the Internet (web and SOCKS proxies, and DNS resolvers). FreeLab is thus free of access by design and up-to-date as far as its users maintain their experimenting machines. Reliability is a key challenge due to the volatile nature of free resources, and the introduction of errors (path inflation, header manipulation, bandwidth shrinkage) caused by traffic relays.

References

[1]
V. Bajpai and J. Schonwalder. 2015. A Survey on Internet Performance Measurement Platforms and Related Standardization Efforts. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials 17, 3 (Apr 2015), 1313--1341.
[2]
Mike Belshe, Roberto Peon, and Martin Thomson. 2015. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2). RFC 7540. (May 2015).
[3]
BISmark. 2017. The Broadband Internet Service Benchmark. (2017). http://projectbismark.net/.
[4]
Taejoong Chung, David Choffnes, and Alan Mislove. 2016. Tunneling for Transparency: A Large-Scale Analysis of End-to-End Violations in the Internet. In Proc. ACM IMC. Santa Monica, California, USA.
[5]
Carlo Contavalli, Wilmer van der Gaast, David C Lawrence, and Warren Kumari. 2016. Client Subnet in DNS Queries. RFC 7871. (May 2016).
[6]
CURL. 1997. Command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs. (1997). https://curl.haxx.se/.
[7]
Diego Perino and Matteo Varvello and Claudio Soriente. 2017. Ciao code. (2017). https://github.com/ciao-dev/CIAO.
[8]
Docker. 2013. The world's leading software container platform. (2013). https://www.docker.com.
[9]
Constantinos Dovrolis, Parameswaran Ramanathan, and David Moore. 2004. Packet-dispersion techniques and a capacity-estimation methodology. IEEE/ACM Transactions On Networking 12, 6 (2004), 963--977.
[10]
Taoufik En Najjary and Guillaume Urvoy Keller. 2008. Passive Capacity Estimation: Comparison of Existing Tools. In SPECTS. Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
[11]
Google. 2015. QUIC: A UDP-Based Secure and Reliable Transport for HTTP/2. (2015). https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tsvwg-quic-protocol-00.
[12]
Hola. 2008. Free VPN, Secure Browsing, Unrestricted Access. (2008). http://hola.org/.
[13]
httpbin(1). 2017. HTTP Request and Response Service. (2017). https://httpbin.org/.
[14]
httping. 2017. Measure the latency of a webserver and network. (2017). https://www.vanheusden.com/httping/.
[15]
Iperf. 2003. The ultimate speed test tool for TCP, UDP and SCTP. (2003). https://iperf.fr/.
[16]
Van Jacobson, Diana K Smetters, James D Thornton, Michael F Plass, Nicholas H Briggs, and Rebecca L Braynard. 2009. Networking named content. In Proc. ACM CoNEXT. Rome, Italy.
[17]
K. Lai and M. Baker. 2001. Nettimer: A Tool for Measuring Bottleneck Link Bandwidth. In Proc. USENIX. Boston, MA, USA.
[18]
M. Leech, M. Ganis, Y. Lee, R. Kuris, D. Koblas, and L. Jones. 1996. SOCKS Protocol Version 5. RFC 1928 (Proposed Standard). (March 1996). http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1928.txt
[19]
LinuxContainers.org. 2017. The umbrella project behind LXC, LXD and LXCFS. (2017). https://linuxcontainers.org.
[20]
Luminati. 2017. The largest proxy network. (2017). https://luminati.io/.
[21]
MONROE. 2017. Measuring Mobile Broadband Networks in Europe. (2017). https://www.monroe-project.eu/.
[22]
Matthew K Mukerjee, David Naylor, Junchen Jiang, Dongsu Han, Srinivasan Seshan, and Hui Zhang. 2015. Practical, real-time centralized control for cdn-based live video delivery. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 45, 4 (2015), 311--324.
[23]
David Naylor, Kyle Schomp, Matteo Varvello, Ilias Leontiadis, Jeremy Blackburn, Diego R López, Konstantina Papagiannaki, Pablo Rodriguez Rodriguez, and Peter Steenkiste. 2015. Multi-context TLS (mcTLS): Enabling secure in-network functionality in TLS. In Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, Vol. 45. ACM, 199--212.
[24]
Netfilter. 1999. The software of the packet filtering framework inside the Linux 2.4.x and later kernel series. (1999). https://www.netfilter.org/.
[25]
Diego Perino, Claudio Soriente, and Matteo Varvello. 2017. ProxyTorrent: Untangling the Free HTTP(S) Proxy Ecosystem. CoRR abs/1612.06126 (2017). arXiv:1612.06126 http://arxiv.org/abs/1612.06126
[26]
Diego Perino, Matteo Varvello, and Claudio Soriente. 2017. CIAO: Automated free proxies discovery/usage. (2017). https://goo.gl/NgJmLE.
[27]
Planetlab. 2017. An open platform for developing, deploying, and accessing planetary-scale services. (2017). https://www.planet-lab.org/.
[28]
Planetlab. 2017. Project. (2017). https://www.planet-lab.org/db/pub/slices.php.
[29]
Planetlab Europe. 2017. The European arm of the global PlanetLab system. (2017). https://www.fed4fire.eu/planetlab-europe/.
[30]
PLCA. 2017. PlanetLab Central API Documentation. (2017). https://www.planet-lab.org/doc/plc_api.
[31]
PlMan. 2017. PlanetLab experiment manager. (2017). http://research.cs.washington.edu/networking/cplane/.
[32]
Polipo. 2015. A caching web proxy. (2015). https://www.irif.fr/~jch//software/polipo/.
[33]
proxychain. 2017. TCP and DNS through proxy server. (2017). http://proxychains.sourceforge.net/.
[34]
PUB-DNS. 2017. Public DNS Server List. (2017). https://public-dns.info//.
[35]
Redsocks. 2017. Transparent socks redirector. (2017). http://darkk.net.ru/redsocks/.
[36]
Charles Reis, Steven D. Gribble, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Nicholas C. Weaver. 2008. Detecting In-Flight Page Changes with Web Tripwires. In NSDI. 31--44.
[37]
RIPE Atlas. 2017. The largest Internet measurement network ever made. (2017). https://atlas.ripe.net/.
[38]
Will Scott, Ravi Bhoraskar, and Arvind Krishnamurthy. 2015. Understanding Open Proxies in the Wild. In Chaos Communication Camp.
[39]
N. Spring, D. Wetherall, and T. Anderson. 2003. Scriptroute: A public Internet measurement facility. In USITS. Berkeley, CA, USA.
[40]
Squid. 2017. Optimising Web Delivery. (2017). http://www.squid-cache.org/.
[41]
Gareth Tyson, Shan Huang, Félix Cuadrado, Ignacio Castro, Vasile Claudiu Perta, Arjuna Sathiaseelan, and Steve Uhlig. 2017. Exploring HTTP Header Manipulation In-The-Wild. In Proc. of WWW. 451--458.
[42]
Unikernels. 2017. Rethinking Cloud Infrastructure. (2017). http://unikernel.org/.
[43]
Wen-li ZHOU and Xiao-fei WU. 2006. Survey of P2P technologies. Computer Engineering and Design 1 (2006), 022.

Index Terms

  1. FreeLab: A Free Experimentation Platform
          Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

          Comments

          Information & Contributors

          Information

          Published In

          cover image ACM Conferences
          HotNets '17: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
          November 2017
          206 pages
          ISBN:9781450355698
          DOI:10.1145/3152434
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

          Sponsors

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          Published: 30 November 2017

          Permissions

          Request permissions for this article.

          Check for updates

          Qualifiers

          • Research-article
          • Research
          • Refereed limited

          Conference

          HotNets-XVI
          Sponsor:
          HotNets-XVI: The 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
          November 30 - December 1, 2017
          CA, Palo Alto, USA

          Acceptance Rates

          HotNets '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 124 submissions, 23%;
          Overall Acceptance Rate 110 of 460 submissions, 24%

          Contributors

          Other Metrics

          Bibliometrics & Citations

          Bibliometrics

          Article Metrics

          • 0
            Total Citations
          • 270
            Total Downloads
          • Downloads (Last 12 months)2
          • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
          Reflects downloads up to 14 Feb 2025

          Other Metrics

          Citations

          View Options

          Login options

          View options

          PDF

          View or Download as a PDF file.

          PDF

          eReader

          View online with eReader.

          eReader

          Figures

          Tables

          Media

          Share

          Share

          Share this Publication link

          Share on social media