Archive for the 'Data Collection' Category

“we should be able to do a much better job at modeling Internet attacks”

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 by kc

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?”

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renewing u.s. telecommunications research

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 by kc

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:

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what we can’t measure on the Internet

Sunday, August 26th, 2007 by kc

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:

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The Future of the Internet: Q&A with kc claffy

Monday, July 23rd, 2007 by kc

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?

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CAIDA’s Annual Report for 2006

Thursday, June 28th, 2007 by kc

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.

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Following Up On ‘A Day in the Life of the Internet’ Challenge

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 by kc

[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.

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A Day in the Life

Monday, September 4th, 2006 by kc

In 2001 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences convened a workshop to assess the state of networking research, and, in pursuit of objectivity and fresh insights, arranged for more than half of the attendees to be from other fields, in this case computer science. Among the most memorable conclusions:

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