one of my favorite program managers is posed the following question by senior management at his defense-related funding agency: “we should be able to do a much better job modeling internet attacks. what research can we fund that would enable us to do a better job at modeling internet attacks?”
[ in sept 2007 i was privileged to attend an invitation-only intensely interactive workshop on the topic of Internet infrastructure economics. participants included economists, network engineers, infrastructure providers, network service providers, regulatory experts, investment analysts, application designers, academic researchers/professors, entrepreneurs/inventors, biologists, oceanographers. almost everyone in more than one category. lots of bloggers. we were all asked to write up a summary of what we learned over the 2.5 days. with permission to anonymize workshop sources of my learnings and post them here. -k. ]
as part of my interest in solving problems of the internet [as related to me by several dozen engineers of operational commercial Internet infrastructure], i pay attention to proposals to improve the conditions of telecommunications research, such as in april 2007 when a UCSD professor testified in front of the U.S. Senate Commerce Subcommittee about the results of a 2006 National Academy of Sciences workshop on Renewing U.S. Telecommunications Research. i looked inside the report for answers to the data sharing problem. i think they’re postponing that for later. instead i found these recommendations:
As the era of the NSFnet Backbone Service came to a close in April 1995, the research community, and the U.S. public, lost the only set of publicly available statistics for a large national U.S. backbone. The transition to the commercial sector essentially eliminated the public availability of statistics and analyses that would allow scientific understanding of the Internet a macroscopic level.
In 2004 I compiled an (incomplete) list of what we generally can’t measure on the Internet, from a talk I gave on our NSF-funded project correlating heterogeneous measurement data to achieve system-level analysis of Internet traffic trends:
i get this question a lot:
at the current churn rate/ratio, at what size does the
FIB need to be before it will not converge? (also sometimes pronounced ‘when will the current Internet routing architecture break?’)
a good question, has been asked many times, and afaik no one has provided any empirically grounded answer.
a few realities hinder our ability to answer this question.
A reprint of a recent interview of kc claffy posted by the San Diego Supercomputer Center regarding the future of the Internet:
kc claffy has played a leading role in Internet research for more than a decade. She is the principal investigator for the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) which is based at SDSC and provides tools and analyses to promote a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. As a research scientist at SDSC her research interests include the collection, analysis, and visualization of workload, routing, topology, performance, and economic data on the Internet. She has been at SDSC since 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego.
Q: You co-founded the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, CAIDA, a little over 10 years ago. Can you tell us how CAIDA has evolved, and what you’re focusing on today?
IEEE published this announcement of a new series of papers related to Internet economics in its may issue:
http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2007/ieeecon/
MAY – JUNE 2007 1089-7801/07/$25.00 c 2007 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society 53 Internet Economics Track Editors: Scott Bradner – sob@harvard.edu kc claffy – kc@caida.org kc claffy and Sascha D. Meinrath Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis Scott O. Bradner Harvard University
The Internet Economics track will address how economic and policy issues relate to the emergence of the Internet as critical infrastructure. Here, the authors provide a historical overview of internetworking, identifying key transitions that have contributed to the Internet’s development and penetration. Its core architecture wasn’t designed to serve as critical communications infrastructure for society; rather, the infrastructure developed far beyond the expectations of the original funding agencies, architects, developers, and early users. The incongruence between the Internet’s underlying architecture and society’s current use and expectations of it means we can no longer study Internet technology in isolation from the political and economic context in which it is deployed.
CAIDA’s 2006 Annual Report covers last year’s efforts, summarizing highlights from our research, infrastructure, and outreach activities. Our current research projects, primarily funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), include several measurement-based studies of the Internet’s core infrastructure, with focus on the health and integrity of the global Internet’s topology, routing, addressing, and naming system. Our infrastructure activities, funded by NSF and DHS as well as other government and industry sources, include building a catalog of Internet measurement data sets, contributing to the (DHS-funded) PREDICT repository of datasets to support the (U.S.-based) network research community, and developing and deploying active and passive measurement infrastructure that cost-effectively supports the global Internet research community. We also lead and participate in tool development to support measurement, analysis, indexing, and dissemination of data from operational global Internet infrastructure. Finally, we engage in a variety of outreach activities, including web sites, peer-reviewed papers, technical reports, presentations, blogging, animations, and workshops. CAIDA’s program plan for 2007-2010 will be available in July 2007.
[okay, that took about four times as long as i’d hoped, but we’re done with a preliminary cataloging of the data collected for our “Day in the Life of the Internet” experiment for 2007. -k]
As a refresher, this is a follow-up to our last year’s announcement that we would try out this experiment recommended by a National Academy of Sciences workshop, specifically, to capture ‘a day in the life of the Internet’ (DITL) to support the needs of network research. We believe the research community now has more measurement data (indexed!) than ever before about a single day of the Internet, and while the data situation is still pretty bleak, a little data is better than even less. In terms of measurements executed, we did significantly better than our practice DITL run in 2006, so there is cause for optimism about the future of this kind of experiment. As the summary makes clear, this year’s progress was mostly due to contributions from outside the U.S., in particular from Korea and Japan, countries which have generally more successfully navigated data sharing issues for their research communities than the U.S. has. We are sorry to say we did not index a single trace from a commercial provider link this year, although we were pleased to get participation from 5 of the 13 root nameserver anycast cluster operators, up from 3 last year.
The following is an excerpt from a discussion forum for the Future of the Internet Workshop hosted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), entitled “If you Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It”. Tom Vest and KC Claffy, Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA).
1. The Internet is now a critical infrastructure and a global platform for communication and commerce. What should be the role of governments in its development and management?