A paper on the PlanetLab Europe packet tracking architecture will be presented at TridentCom 2010, 18-20 May 2010, Berlin, Germany.

The paper, "Packet Tracking in PlanetLab Europe - A Use Case" was authored by Tanja Zseby, Christian Henke, and Michael Kleis.

Making observations is fundamental for experimental research. Experimental facilities have to provide sophisticated and flexible tools to support scientists and their experiments by logging experiment results and monitoring environment conditions. The provisioning of measurements in a testbed can also help experimenters by providing a standardized input for adaptive algorithms under test. In the paper, the authors present a packet tracking architecture that they implemented in PlanetLab Europe to support experiments.

The researchers show how multi-point observations can be correlated and present methods to reduce and control measurement resource consumption during experiments by statistical sampling. We show how to synchronize data selection processes at multiple observation points.

In the paper, the researchers' approach is based on the exploitation and extension of recent standardization efforts in IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) and Packet Sampling (PSAMP). As an example use case for the packet tracking architecture, they show how the packet tracking features are used to support experiments on functional composition on application layer.