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.{{Cite journal | last1 = Matthews | first1 = W. | last2 = Cottrell | first2 = L. | doi = 10.1109/35.841837 | title = The PingER project: Active Internet performance monitoring for the HENP community | journal = IEEE Communications Magazine | volume = 38 | issue = 5 | pages = 130 | year = 2000 }}[http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/paperwork/ieee/ieee.pdf Stanford University]
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.
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." PingER is one of several collaborative projects having measurement infrastructures for monitoring Internet Traffic.{{Cite book | last1 = Obraczka | first1 = K. |author1-link=Katia Obraczka| last2 = Silva | first2 = F. | doi = 10.1109/GLOCOM.2000.892040 | chapter = Network latency metrics for server proximity | title = Globecom '00 - IEEE. Global Telecommunications Conference. Conference Record (Cat. No.00CH37137) | volume = 1 | pages = 421 | year = 2000 | isbn = 0-7803-6451-1 | s2cid = 20232413 }}{{Cite book | last1 = Wu-Chun Feng | last2 = Hay | first2 = J. R. | last3 = Gardner | first3 = M. K. | doi = 10.1109/ICCCN.2001.956227 | chapter = MAGNeT: monitor for application-generated network traffic | title = Proceedings Tenth International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (Cat. No.01EX495) | pages = 110 | year = 2001 | isbn = 0-7803-7128-3 | s2cid = 7230920 | url = https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc933936/ }}{{Cite journal | last1 = Chen | first1 = T. M. | title = Network traffic measurements and experiments \Guest Editorial | doi = 10.1109/MCOM.2000.841835 | journal = IEEE Communications Magazine | volume = 38 | issue = 5 | pages = 120 | year = 2000 }}
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
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. 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.
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. This collection of data shows long term world-wide Internet performance trends, covering over 750 sites in over 165 countries. 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. 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.
Poor results for Africa
Analysis of some of the PingER data reveal that:
- 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.
See also
References
{{reflist|refs=
{{cite web|title=Ping End-to-end Reporting
|author=Les Cottrell
|url=http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/
|accessdate=2013-05-06}}
{{cite book
| title =Customer-Based Ip Service Monotoring With Mobile Software Agents
| last =Gunter
| first =Manuel
| url =https://books.google.com/books?id=WjH7Hk3LD4wC
| accessdate =2013-05-15
| year =2002
| publisher =Springer
| isbn =9783764369170
| page =131
| chapter =Chapter 49: Measurement Testbeds
}}
| last1 =Zennaro
| first1 =M.
| last2 =Canessa
| first2 =E.
|date= October 2006
| title =Scientific Measure of Africa's Connectivity
| journal =Information Technologies and International Development
| volume =3
| issue =1
| pages =55–64
| publisher =MIT Press
| doi =10.1162/itid.2006.3.1.55
| doi-broken-date =4 April 2025
| accessdate =2013-05-13
| url =https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24090531
| doi-access =free
}}
|title=The Emergence of the Internet and Africa
|date=May 6, 2013
|author=Les Cottrell
|url=https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/download/attachments/17164/colloquium.pptx?version=2&modificationDate=1367888901000
|accessdate=2013-05-09}}
|title=End-to-End Arguments in the Internet: Principles, Practices, and Theory
|author=Matthias Bärwolff
|url=http://opus.kobv.de/tuberlin/volltexte/2010/2830/pdf/baerwolff_matthias.pdf
|accessdate=2013-05-09}}
{{cite web|title=PingER Data Explorer
|author=Les Cottrell
|url=http://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/PingER+Data+Explorer
|accessdate=2013-05-08}}
{{cite web |title=How Bad Is Africa's Internet |author=R. Les Cottrell
|publisher=IEEE Spectrum |date=29 Jan 2013
|url=https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-bad-is-africas-internet
|access-date=2013-05-07}}
{{cite web |title=ICFA SCIC Network Monitoring Report
|publisher=International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) |date=January 28, 2011
|author=Harvey Newman (Caltech), Les Cottrell (SLAC) and Zafar Gilani (SLAC and NUST)
|url=http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/icfa/icfa-net-paper-jan11/report-jan11.docx
|accessdate=2013-05-07}}
|title=Mechanism
|publisher=Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Italy
|author=Science Dissemination Unit
|url=http://sdu.ictp.it/pinger/pinger.html
|accessdate=2013-05-09
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131010010244/http://sdu.ictp.it/pinger/pinger.html
|archive-date=2013-10-10
|url-status=dead
}}
|title=Analysis and Implementation of Relational Archive Site for PingER and CBG Integration with TULIP
|publisher=School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (SEECS), Pakistan |year=2011
|author=Anjum Naveed
|url=http://dspace.seecs.nust.edu.pk/jspui/handle/123456789/584
|accessdate=2013-05-09}}
|title=Internet Measurement Infrastructure
|publisher= The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center
|date= April 22, 2008
|url=http://www.caida.org/research/performance/measinfra/
|accessdate=2013-05-12}}
}}
External links
- [http://www.caida.org/research/performance/measinfra/ The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (caida)] Internet Measurement Infrastructure
- [http://www.cs.bu.edu/pub/imic/talks/zekauskas.pdf Surveyor] approach to performance measurement