Towards an Agentic Workflow for Internet Measurement Research
This addresses the problem of rapid diagnostic workflow development for network operators and researchers, though it is incremental as it automates existing expert patterns rather than introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the accessibility crisis in Internet measurement research by introducing ArachNet, a system that uses LLM agents to automatically generate expert-level measurement workflows, handling complex multi-framework integration that typically requires days of manual effort.
Internet measurement research faces an accessibility crisis: complex analyses require custom integration of multiple specialized tools that demands specialized domain expertise. When network disruptions occur, operators need rapid diagnostic workflows spanning infrastructure mapping, routing analysis, and dependency modeling. However, developing these workflows requires specialized knowledge and significant manual effort. We present ArachNet, the first system demonstrating that LLM agents can independently generate measurement workflows that mimics expert reasoning. Our core insight is that measurement expertise follows predictable compositional patterns that can be systematically automated. ArachNet operates through four specialized agents that mirror expert workflow, from problem decomposition to solution implementation. We validate ArachNet with progressively challenging Internet resilience scenarios. The system independently generates workflows that match expert-level reasoning and produce analytical outputs similar to specialist solutions. Generated workflows handle complex multi-framework integration that traditionally requires days of manual coordination. ArachNet lowers barriers to measurement workflow composition by automating the systematic reasoning process that experts use, enabling broader access to sophisticated measurement capabilities while maintaining the technical rigor required for research-quality analysis.