XPLANE: Real-­Time Awareness of Tactical Networks

Abstract

Emerging ad hoc networking environments, such as those currently being adopted by the defense and first response communities, call for a new generation of network monitoring capability. Current monitoring tools must either rely upon measurement protocols designed for a previous generation of systems or leverage only a subset of network devices that support some custom protocol. For certain kinds of networks, we make the case for shifting from a protocol to a language-based approach to measurement and for allowing a para-network facility which we call the XPLANE to reside on every network device, enabling system designers and administrators to craft tailored, localized measurements. The language we describe provides a higher-level abstraction for synchronous measurement while alleviating both the programmer and the interpreter from maintaining synchronization state for the computation. This has significant consequences for the complexity and resiliency of measurements. Our approach also separates localization and measurement from the logical network configuration, enabling diagnosis in the face of device misconfiguration. In this technical report we present the design and implementation of the XPLANE and provide several example applications to illustrate its use.