Beacon Project

The focus of the Beacon project is the development of tools capable of diagnosing network conditions with only the assistance of end-to-end measurements. In its basic form, this toolkit is designed to passively monitor network conditions at a single busy network endpoint such as a Mass server. In its full generality, the toolkit can be used to actively monitor network conditions, and can be concurrently operated by a set of collaborating endpoints. Over short time scales, Beacon will use wavelet analysis to identify local scaling events in wide-area TCP traffic which trigger bursts of packet loss. At medium time scales, Beacon will draw correlations between end-to-end measurements made by concurrent TCP connections to draw conclusions about hotspots in the network. Over the long time scales, Beacon will build up an understanding of long-term network dynamics, especially focusing on regions which persistently experience congestion from the perspective of the source. Components of the Beacon Toolkit will be made available from the MASS server project "Software" page.