NeTS - NR: A Shared Facility for Internet Reverse Engineering

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal Number: 0435065 PI: Thomas Anderson Institution: University of Washington, Seattle Title: A Shared Facility for Internet Reverse Engineering Abstract: Today, network researchers are hamstrung by a lack of quantitative data about the Internet's structure and operation, much as biologists prior to the Human Genome Project were hampered by a lack of data. To meet this need, the investigators are designing and building an open, shared facility for the continuous measurement, analysis, and archival of the Internet's underlying structure and operational controls. The facility allows any researcher to gain access to a live or archived feed of information about the Internet's structure and to contribute new measurement and analysis tools, thus renewing and improving the facility as a community effort over time. Three factors enable this effort: 1) recent advances in network measurement provide techniques to infer Internet properties from external observations where they were previously hidden by network boundaries; 2) large-scale, wide-area testbeds (exemplified by PlanetLab) provide a distributed platform that hosts the facility; and 3) large-scale data collection and warehousing is feasible and cost-effective given technology trends. The key expected result is the public availability of an unprecedented data set: an annotated map of the entire Internet, complete with a rich set of link, router and operational attributes. This will allow researchers to investigate the extent of problems in practice, construct models of the Internet to predict its behavior, and evaluate proposed protocol designs using real data. The broad impact of this work is to improve the quality and effectiveness of network research, and thus ultimately the security, efficiency and flexibility of the Internet itself.