Current active measurement techniques run independently of application traffic and compete with it for bandwidth. As a remedy to this, some applications try to use their own traffic to perform measurement, but this is done in an ad hoc manner that is tightly coupled to the application itself. On the other hand, most standalone active measurement tools include significant portions of empty padding in their probes. A natural optimization is to reuse this wasted bandwidth for useful data, enabling applications to measure the network in the course of sending their own data traffic.

In this paper we present MGRP, a system for transparently integrating measurement and application traffic. Through a series of experiments and empirical evaluation we show that MGRP permits continuous network measurement in the presence of application traffic. This enables applications to quickly respond to varying network conditions with minimal impact on their own traffic and competing traffic while increasing the timeliness of measurement results.

@MISC{papageorgiou08mgrp,
  AUTHOR = {Pavlos Papageorgiou and Justin McCann and Michael Hicks},
  TITLE = {MGRP: Active Measurement, Passively},
  MONTH = OCT,
  YEAR = 2008,
  SUBMITTED = {yes}
}