Last week I gave a talk at NSF’s 39th Washington Area Trustworthy Computing Hour (WATCH) seminar series on CAIDA’s efforts to map internet interdomain congestion. A recorded webcast of the talk is available.

Abstract:

We used the Ark infrastructure to support an ambitious collaboration with MIT to map the rich mesh of interconnection in the Internet, with a focus on congestion induced by evolving peering and traffic management practices of CDNs and access ISPs, including methods to detect and localize the congestion to specific points in networks. We undertook several studies to pursue two dimensions of this challenge. First, we developed methods and tools to identify interconnection borders, and in some cases their physical locations, from comprehensive Internet topology measurements from many edge vantage points. Then, we developed and deployed scalable performance measurement tools to observe performance at thousands of interconnections, algorithms to mine for evidence of persistent congestion in the resulting data; and a system to visualize the results. We produce other related data collection and analysis to enable evaluation of these measurements in the larger context of the evolving ecosystem: quantifying a given network service providers’ global routing footprint; and business-related classifications of networks. In parallel, we examined the peering ecosystem from an economic perspective, exploring fundamental weaknesses and systemic problems of the currently deployed economic framework of Internet interconnection that will continue to cause peering disputes between ASes.

The slides presented are posted on the CAIDA website: Mapping Internet Interdomain Congestion

On August 6, 2016, AT&T sent a letter to the FCC regarding Applications of AT&T Inc. and DIRECTV for Consent To Assign or Transfer Control of Licenses and Authorizations, MB Docket No. 14-90 reporting that an amended version of CAIDA’s proposed methodology as an independent measurement expert of AT&T’s interconnection performance has been accepted by AT&T to address the concerns that AT&T had with the original proposed methodology.

The amended report, First Amended Report of AT&T Independent Measurement Expert: Reporting requirements and measurement methods is available online, along with the justification for the amendment.

CAIDA’s work with AT&T is found on CAIDA’s Measuring Internet Interconnection Performance Metrics page.

The final report for our 8th Workshop on Active Internet Measurements (AIMS-8) is available for viewing. The abstract:

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