PingER Project

PingER, an acronym for Ping End-to-end Reporting, measures round-trip travel time of a packet of data between two nodes on the Internet. The PingER' Project uses a simple tool—the ping command—to get valuable insights into performance of the Internet backbone.[1]

High energy particle physicists began the project in 1995, because they needed to access large amounts of data at laboratories sometimes as far away as across an ocean. They needed to know how the Internet was performing, identify problems, and apply solutions.[2] At U.S.Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, PingER let researcher Les Cottrell "keep tabs on how parts of the network were performing and root out any problems."[3] PingER is one of several collaborative projects having measurement infrastructures for monitoring Internet Traffic.[4][5][6][7]

How PingER works

Using the ping command, monitoring nodes initiate transmissions to remote nodes, then measure and record the response times, or the lack of responses.[2][8] Each combination of monitoring node-remote node is called a pair. PingER is easy to implement, because little special software must be installed to make measurements. Almost any networked computer will respond to a ping, and require nothing added.[9] Monitoring nodes require only a script to issue ping commands and record results. In September 1999 there were 1977 pairs, consisting of 511 remote nodes in 54 countries.[1][10]

PingER uses the data to determine latency (round-trip_time), jitter (variability of round-trip_time), and loss (percentage of packets that never return). The results of the PingER Project, including source code, are made available to the public at no cost.[1][11] This collection of data shows long term world-wide Internet performance trends, covering over 750 sites in over 165 countries.[12] Researchers at the National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan, have been dealing with increasingly large amounts of PingER data by using a relational database.[13] From a vantage point between Europe and Africa, researchers at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy used PingER to reveal the slow progress of improving Africa's connections to the rest of the world.[14]

Poor results for Africa

Analysis of some of the PingER data reveal that:[15]

  • Africa's internet was lagging 16 years behind Europe in 2009.
  • The World Soccer Cup in South Africa in 2010 led to new submarine cables, resulting in much shorter return times.
  • Angola, Zimbabia, Tanzania, Uganda have shown improvements as they converted from satellite to terrestrial links.
gollark: Imagine using shell scripts instead of forsaken Python.
gollark: Fascinating.
gollark: > golang
gollark: Obviously the lace person has had [REDACTED] time units and resources to hone their craft.
gollark: Oh, we're discussing *magic-based* ones so it's fine.

See also

References
  1. Matthews, W.; Cottrell, L. (2000). "The PingER project: Active Internet performance monitoring for the HENP community". IEEE Communications Magazine. 38 (5): 130. doi:10.1109/35.841837.Stanford University
  2. Gunter, Manuel (2002). "Chapter 49: Measurement Testbeds". Customer-Based Ip Service Monotoring With Mobile Software Agents. Springer. p. 131. ISBN 9783764369170. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  3. R. Les Cottrell (29 Jan 2013). "How Bad Is Africa's Internet". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved 2013-05-07.
  4. "Internet Measurement Infrastructure". The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center. April 22, 2008. Retrieved 2013-05-12.
  5. Obraczka, K.; Silva, F. (2000). "Network latency metrics for server proximity". Globecom '00 - IEEE. Global Telecommunications Conference. Conference Record (Cat. No.00CH37137). 1. p. 421. doi:10.1109/GLOCOM.2000.892040. ISBN 0-7803-6451-1.
  6. Wu-Chun Feng; Hay, J. R.; Gardner, M. K. (2001). "MAGNeT: monitor for application-generated network traffic". Proceedings Tenth International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (Cat. No.01EX495). p. 110. doi:10.1109/ICCCN.2001.956227. ISBN 0-7803-7128-3.
  7. Chen, T. M. (2000). "Network traffic measurements and experiments \Guest Editorial". IEEE Communications Magazine. 38 (5): 120–120. doi:10.1109/MCOM.2000.841835.
  8. Les Cottrell. "Ping End-to-end Reporting". Retrieved 2013-05-06.
  9. Science Dissemination Unit. "Mechanism". Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Italy. Archived from the original on 2013-10-10. Retrieved 2013-05-09.
  10. Matthias Bärwolff. "End-to-End Arguments in the Internet: Principles, Practices, and Theory" (PDF). Retrieved 2013-05-09.
  11. Les Cottrell. "PingER Data Explorer". Retrieved 2013-05-08.
  12. Harvey Newman (Caltech), Les Cottrell (SLAC) and Zafar Gilani (SLAC and NUST) (January 28, 2011). "ICFA SCIC Network Monitoring Report". International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). Retrieved 2013-05-07.
  13. Anjum Naveed (2011). "Analysis and Implementation of Relational Archive Site for PingER and CBG Integration with TULIP". School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (SEECS), Pakistan. Retrieved 2013-05-09.
  14. Zennaro, M.; Canessa, E. (October 2006). "Scientific Measure of Africa's Connectivity". Information Technologies and International Development. MIT Press. 3 (1): 55–64. Retrieved 2013-05-13.
  15. Les Cottrell (May 6, 2013). "The Emergence of the Internet and Africa". Retrieved 2013-05-09.
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