Which network measurement tool is right for you? a multidimensional comparison study

Network performance measurement and prediction is one of the most prominent and indispensable components in distributed computing environments. The selection of the most advantageous network measurement tool or system for specific needs can be very time consuming and may require detailed experimental analysis. The multi-dimensional aspects and properties of such systems or tools should be considered in parallel. In this paper, we take two of the most widely used and accepted network measurement tools as a case study: Iperf and network weather service. We compare these two prediction tools by listing the pros and cons based on accuracy, overhead, intrusiveness, system requirements, capabilities, reliability, scalability and response time. We present different methodologies used to measure their performance in previous experiments and run experiments for comparing them to actual FTP, GridFTP and SCP transfers based on different parameters.