mPlane – an Intelligent Measurement Plane for Future Network and Application Management

  

Internet

 

Decentralized and diverse, the Internet is resilient and universal. However, its distributed nature leads to operational brittleness and difficulty in identifying and tracking the root causes of performance and availability issues. The first step to improve this fragmentation is measurement: illuminating the currently obscure dynamics of the Internet. To address this, we advocate a measurement plane, or mPlane alongside the Internet’s data and control planes.

 


mPlane consists of a Distributed Measurement Infrastructure to perform active, passive and hybrid measurements; it operates at a wide variety of scales and dynamically supports new functionality. A Repository and Analysis layer collects, stores, and analyses the collected data via parallel processing and data mining. Finally, an Intelligent Reasoner iteratively drills down into the cause of an evidence, determining the conditions leading to given issues, and supporting the understanding of problem origins.

Recent Blog Entries

mPlane is officially over - but we'll be still alive!

After three years of work, 25+ Deliverables, 120+ papers, 45+ open source software tools, 7 patents, 3 RFCs, 2 PhD Schools, and an endless list of presentations and public talk, mPlane is over. We all enjoyed working with brilliant people, having open discussions, and sleepless nights to finalise a document and fix a bug.

Thanks to everybody for the fun in working together. Keep follwing us... but let us celebrate now :)

mPlane SDK tutorial at METRICS Bootcamp 2014

From Monday August 25th, 2014 to September 5th, 2014 at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium was held the METRICS Bootcamp 2014. mPlaners were invited to give tutorials.

mPlane at the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC 2015

mPlane has been present as exhibitor at the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC 2015), in Paris.

This was a great event: many people came to our boot, to get the chance to see our live demos, grab a flyer, talk to our experts, get in touch with the mPlane community and adopt our technology. If you missed the event, dont worry: keep reading and try our online demos, or watch the videos from the YouTube mPlane channel!

mPlane SDK for Python 3 released

The mPlane Software Development Kit for Python 3 is now available from the Python Package Index. From any reasonable Python 3 installation, you can now simply type:

$ pip install mplane-sdk

(note that you may need to be root to do this, depending on your Python configuration).

To learn more about the SDK, start with the README file

Developing new components with the SDK is relatively straightforward: you simply have to wrap the code performing your measurement or query in an instance of mplane.model.Service, define capabilities to describe the specifications that code implements, and create a configuration file pointing at this Service, defining the certificate identifying the component and configuring access control. Then start the component runtime by running:

$ mpcom --config <path-to-config-file>

On the Rationale for the mPlane Measurement Architecture

mPlane is architected around three principles, derived from the challenges presented by the distributed, multiscalar, heterogenous environment in which it must operate: schema-centric measurement definition, explicit iterative measurement support, and weak imperativeness.

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