CNS Core: Small: Event Identification in Evaluation of Internet Outages

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The EIEIO (Event Identification and Evaluation of Internet Outages) project will develop new algorithms to (1) improve coverage of Internet outage detection to cover millions of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) (the primary current Internet) networks that are today uncovered, and extending coverage to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) (the new protocol used by about 30% of America today). (2) analyze this raw data to determine identifiable outage events. (3) relate these events to real-world causes using other datasets. The results of this work will be additional information about Internet reliability, allowing citizens to make informed choices of provider, governments to assess the services their citizens receive, and ISPs to evaluate their offerings and justify improvements. Data from this work will help society understand the impact of natural disasters (such as hurricanes) as they are occurring and will be made available to researchers at no cost. Understanding Internet reliability is critically important to us. Recent methods have emerged that directly measure Internet-wide reliability, but the EIEIO (Event Identification and Evaluation of Internet Outages) project proposes three steps to move our understanding forward: (1) Improving IPv4 coverage to include millions of networks that cannot be reliably measured today, and extending outage detection to IPv6; (2) converting the millions of raw observations into identifiable events; (3) relating these events to real-world causes. The intellectual merit of the EIEIO project is to fundamentally expand Internet outage detection in these three ways. The EIEIO project will develop new algorithms to increase IPv4 coverage with more sensitive analysis, examine passive and active measurements that reach to IPv6. The EIEIO project will develop clustering algorithms that group raw data to events at Internet scales (millions of events over months of data). The EIEIO project will improve confidence in these results with careful comparison of outage observations and events from multiple data sources, including different observation methods and external data sources. The EIEIO project will help increase confidence in our ability to use fine-grain observations of Internet outages for IPv4 and IPv6 and provide data that will help network architects change network designs to improve network resilience. Results from the project could help citizens selecting network providers to make informed choices about their network purchases, governments to assess the service their citizens receive, and ISPs compare their offerings and justify improvements. Network outage data can assist first responders and citizens to understand natural disasters (such as hurricanes) as they are occurring. This project will also quantify network reliability to assist policy makers evaluating telecommunications policy and economics, and to carry out long-range planning. Finally, this data will motivate improvements by ISPs to Internet reliability, improving the Internet for all users. Data generated from this project will be made available to researchers at no cost and used to support education and research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.