kTRxer: A portable toolkit for reliable internet probing

Being one of the primitives of Internet measurement and security scanning, active probing has numerous applications. While the majority of existing probing tools were designed for PCs/servers, the wide adoption of mobile devices and embedded systems bring new requirements and challenges to active probing, for example, the limited resources in those devices may affect active probing's accuracy and efficiency. However, few research studies examine such impact. In this paper, we fill the gap by investigating the effect of resource-limited devices on common packet sending/receiving techniques used by probing tools and proposing kTRxer, a toolkit that can be run in many devices to help probing tools achieve better accuracy and efficiency. kTRxer mitigates the negative effect from devices by keeping away from noise sources and achieves portability by avoiding modifying specific device drivers. We have implemented kTRxer with 5489 lines of C codes and conducted extensive evaluation on three platforms, including PC, broadband router, and smartphone. The experimental results show that kTRxer can achieve up to 10 times transmission rate and introduce much less delay noise than existing approaches.