Designing Experiments to Avoid Internet Measurement Pitfalls

The Internet is heterogeneous, spanning many different types of networks. Wide-scale measurements (e.g. to a large number of targets or from a large number of vantage points) are very useful to understand it and to guide protocol standardisation.
Using extension headers as an example, we will discuss lessons learned from building wide-scale active Internet measurements and identify mistakes that have at some point or another ruined our measurement campaigns. I will give concrete examples from experiments to measure IPv6 Hop-by-Hop and Destination Option Extension Headers over a variety of paths in the past 8 years to help others avoid the same pitfalls in the future.

IRTF MAPRG at IETF-116 (Yokohama)