Metis: Selecting Diverse Atlas Vantage Points

Abstract

The popularity of the RIPE Atlas measurement platform comes primarily from its openness and unprecedented scale. The platform provides users with over ten thousand vantage points, called probes, and is usually considered as giving a reasonably faithful view of the Internet. A good use of Atlas, however, requires a clear understanding of its limitations and bias. In this work we highlight the influence of probe locations on Atlas measurements and advocate the importance of selecting a diverse set of probes for fair measurements. We propose Metis, a data-driven probe selection method, that picks a diverse set of probes based on topological properties (e.g., round-trip time or AS-path length). Using real experiments we show that, compared to Atlas’ default probe selection, Metis’ probe selections collect more comprehensive measurement results in terms of geographical, topological, RIR, and industry-type coverage. Metis triples the number of probes from the underrepresented AFRINIC and LACNIC regions, and improves geographical diversity by increasing the number of unique countries included in the probe set by up to 59%. In addition, we extend Metis to identify locations on the Internet where new probes would be the most beneficial for improving Atlas’ footprint. Finally, we present a website where we publish periodically updated results and provide easy integration of Metis’ selections with Atlas.