Amidst the recent political unrest in the Middle East, researchers have observed significant changes in Internet traffic and connectivity. In this article we tap into a previously unused source of data: unsolicited Internet traffic arriving from Libya. The traffic data we captured shows distinct changes in unsolicited traffic patterns since 17 February 2011.

I post this article to describe the results of my five month visit to CAIDA and UC San Diego, and to thank the organizations that collaborated to make this work possible.

• CAIDA welcomed me as a visitor to UCSD’s renowned San Diego Supercomputer Center, to work on a new tool for Internet data visualization which we are calling “Caidagram”;
• RIPE NCC sponsored my visit at CAIDA, part of their continual efforts to cooperate with top Internet research groups in the world;
• Roma Tre is the University where I started a PhD program with the Compunet research group, after obtaining my Master’s degree accompanied by an internship held at the RIPE NCC.

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We have studied growth trends in the number of ASes seen advertised in the global routing system from different regional registries (similar to Geoff Huston’s 32-bit AS Number Report, but with per-registry trends). We used Routeviews and RIPE BGP dumps over the last 12 years, and Team Cymru’s WHOIS lookup service to map ASNes to registries as of March 2010. To our knowledge, historical data to map an ASN to a regional registry at any given time in the past is not available, so we cannot account for ASN movement between registries. More information about the data collection and pre-processing is in our IMC 2008 paper, “Ten Years in the Evolution of the Internet Ecosystem” and our supplemental data page.

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This post is our submitted response to NSF’s call for expressions of interest in the Future Internet Architectures summit, which i am attending this week.

What scientific contributions will you bring to the discussion about Future Internet architectures?

As scientists, we are compelled to explore how the peculiar structure relates to the function(s) of complex networks. Many complex networks in nature share the peculiar structural character of the Internet, but they also manifest phenomenal behavior: they efficiently route information without any observable routing protocol overhead. This achievement is currently beyond the reach of man-made networks. The Internet still uses a 30-year old routing architecture with fundamentally unscalable overhead requirements.  Yet in those 30 years, the Internet’s inter-domain topology has evolved toward a structure for which nature has superior routing technology, if only we can figure out how to use it!

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[drafted this entry a few months ago but have been reluctant to post because it’s incomplete. but after reading about the ARIN Board’s emergency proposal last week to create IPv4 address markets, variations of which have already been approved in European (RIPE) and Asia-Pacific (APNIC) IP address policy communities, i decided it’s complete enough. -k.]

A few policy questions on which the RIR-community should funnel address-registration tax dollars into peer-reviewed research:

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[Jump to a Top Ten item: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10]

#9: The news is not all bad: there is a reason everyone wants to be connected to all the world’s knowledge — as well as each other — besides its status as the most powerful complex system ever created by man. The Internet’s practical promise for individual freedom, democratic engagement, and economic empowerment, is also unparalleled. This promise is sufficient inspiration for an open, technically literate conversation about how to invest in technologies and policies to support articulated social objectives.

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#8: The opaqueness of the infrastructure to empirical analysis has generated many problematic responses from rigidly circumscribed communities earnestly trying to get their jobs done.

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#3: Despite the methodological limitations of Internet science today, the few data points available suggest a dire picture:

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the U.S. FCC is trying to improve the way it measures broadband penetration, though the primary mode of measurement is still gathering data from the providers themselves. some meta-data on how the big three (verizon, att, tw) track penetration of their network infrastructures for the last year:

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