Shared internet-scale measurement platforms

The internet research community benefits from being able to deploy experimental software and conduct measurements from vantage points broadly scattered across the network. The currently widest-spread platform, RIPE Atlas, present in 6% of IPv4 and 9% of IPv6 ASes, allows a few types of measurements from mostly resource-limited devices. PlanetLab offers general software deployment, but the US-based instance is gone, while PlanetLab Europe continues with just 36 nodes that offer a four-year-old Linux distribution on nodes that may be twice that age. The software-only Seattle testbed came closest to offering the community the ability to run both general code and measurements from a large number of vantage points. Can we draw lessons from experience going pack over twenty years (see table) to break through and finally put into production an internet-scale general-purpose fully measurement-capable platform? This white paper addresses two of the critical questions raised by the WOMBIR workshop: (1) "What infrastructure is needed for such [internet measurement] data?" (2) "How can we develop best practices to facilitate cooperation or collaboration with commercial service providers as we collect data?"