Design Considerations for Information Planes

The concept of an information plane has emerged recently as an important part of large, decentralized systems that aspire to be self-managing, ranging from PlanetLab to the Internet itself. In this paper we describe what an information plane is, and report our experiences in developing and deploying an information plane for the PlanetLab platform using the PIER distributed relational query processor. We recount the lessons we have learned from the experience, and the additional directions we intend to explore in the PHI project, which aims at providing an information plane that can grow to serve a significant portion of the Internet.