The paper "Increasing the Coverage of Vantage Points in Distributed Active Network Measurements by Crowdsourcing" by Valentin Burger, Matthias Hirth, Christian Schwartz, Tobias Hoßfeld, Phuoc Tran-Gia has been presented at the 17th International GI/ITG Conference on Measurement, Modelling and Evaluation of Computing Systems (MMB 2014), Bamberg, Germany, March 2014.Abstract: Internet video constitutes more than half of all consumer traffic. Most of the video traffic is delivered

by content delivery networks (CDNs). The huge amount of traffic from video CDNs poses problems to access providers. To understand and monitor the impact of video traffic on access networks and the topology of CDNs, distributed active measurements are needed. Recently used measurement platforms are mainly hosted in National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). However, the view of these platforms on the CDN is very limited, since the coverage of NRENs is low in developing countries. Furthermore, campus networks do not reflect the characteristics of end user access networks.
We propose to use crowdsourcing to increase the coverage of vantage points in distributed active network measurements. In this study, we compare measurements of a global CDN conducted in PlanetLab with measurements assigned to workers of a crowdsourcing platform. Thus, the coverage of vantage points and the sampled part of the global video CDN are analyzed. Our results show that the capability of PlanetLab to measure global CDNs is rather low, since the vast majority of requests is directed to the US. By using a crowdsourcing platform we obtain adiverse set of vantage points that reveals more than twice as many autonomous systems deploying video servers.