The last twenty years have seen the development and popularity of network measurement infrastructures. Internet measurement platforms have become common and have demonstrated their relevance in Internet understanding and security observation. However, despite their popularity, those platforms lack of flexibility and reactivity, as they are usually used for longitudinal measurements. As a consequence, they may miss detecting events that are security or Internet-related. During the same period, operating systems have evolved to virtual machines (VMs) as self-contained units for running applications, with the recent rise of unikernels, ultra-lightweight VMs tailored for specific applications, eliminating the need for a host OS. In this paper, we advocate that measurement infrastructures could take advantage of unikernels to become more flexible and efficient. We propose uTNT, a proof-of-concept unikernel-based implementation of TNT, a traceroute extension able to reveal MPLS tunnels. This paper documents the full toolchain for porting TNT into a unikernel and evaluates uTNT performance with respect to more traditional approaches. The paper also discusses a use case in which uTNT could find a suitable usage. uTNT source code is publicly available on Gitlab.

翻译：[translated abstract in Chinese] 过去二十年见证了网络测量基础设施的发展与普及。互联网测量平台已变得普遍，并在互联网理解与安全观测中展现出重要价值。然而，尽管这些平台广受欢迎，但由于通常用于纵向测量，它们存在灵活性与响应性不足的缺陷，可能导致错过安全事件或互联网相关事件的检测。与此同时，操作系统已演变为以虚拟机（VM）作为运行应用程序的自包含单元，而近年兴起的Unikernel——针对特定应用定制的超轻量级虚拟机，则消除了宿主操作系统的需求。本文主张测量基础设施可借助Unikernel提升灵活性与效率。我们提出uTNT——一种基于Unikernel的概念验证实现，该方案源自TNT（一种可揭示MPLS隧道的traceroute扩展）。本文详细记录了将TNT移植到Unikernel的完整工具链，并与传统方法进行了性能对比评估，同时探讨了uTNT的潜在应用场景。uTNT源代码已在Gitlab上公开发布。