CI-EN: Internet Laboratory for Empirical Network Science: Next Phase (iLENS-NP)

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

A strength of the Internet is that it is a federation of network providers instead of a monolithic infrastructure. However, this federation limits visibility into network configuration and operations and negatively impacts the capability of research and development efforts to model network behavior and topology, design protocols and/or new architectures, and study real-world properties such as robustness, resilience, and economics. The application of edge-based measurement and analysis techniques is key to overcoming these limitations. The secure measurement platform, Archipelago (Ark) supports large-scale active measurement studies of the global Internet. Since 2007 Archipelago has gathered a large set of network topology data which used for a broad spectrum of scientific research. Ark is a unique laboratory in which researchers can quickly design, implement, and easily coordinate the execution of experiments across a globally distributed set of dedicated monitors. This project will enhance Ark's capabilities and data products in order to support network research, providing empirical grounding for study of many real-world Internet phenomena, theoretical and practical efforts in network modeling and mapping; longitudinal studies of the Internet's historical evolution, and evaluation of potential future network architectures. The project consists of four infrastructure development tasks: (i) deploying a new hardware architecture that expands the scale and manageability of the infrastructure, (ii) integrating recent measurement technology advances to enable fundamentally new scientific experiments and data sets, (iii) upgrading the functionality of the measurement-on-demand web interface to the Ark platform, and (iv) creating a new interface for browsing, querying, and visualizing the data gathered.