Obtaining sound inferences over remote networks via active or passive measurements is difficult. Active measurement campaigns face challenges of load, coverage, and visibility. Passive measurements require a privileged vantage point. Even networks under our own control too often remain poorly understood and hard to diagnose. As a step toward the democratization of Internet measurement, we consider the inferential power possible were the network to include a constant and predictable stream of dedicated lightweight measurement traffic. We posit an Internet "heartbeat," which nodes periodically send to random destinations, and show how aggregating heartbeats facilitates introspection into parts of the network that are today generally obtuse. We explore the design space of an Internet heartbeat, potential use cases, incentives, and paths to deployment.
Individual networks frequently perform regular pair-wise measurements between nodes or networks under their control, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) that run continual measurements to detect and route around path problems @cite_39 . The IHB seeks to push such functionality deeper into the network stack such that all networks are empowered with such knowledge without having to implement their own application-layer protocols and measurements. As importantly, the IHB disseminates global knowledge about the Internet, rather than focusing on an individual network.
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Comprising more than 61,000 servers located across nearly 1,000 networks in 70 countries worldwide, the Akamai platform delivers hundreds of billions of Internet interactions daily, helping thousands of enterprises boost the performance and reliability of their Internet applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the components and capabilities of this large-scale distributed computing platform, and offer some insight into its architecture, design principles, operation, and management.