[Executive Summary from our annual report for 2014:]

This annual report covers CAIDA’s activities in 2014, summarizing highlights from our research, infrastructure, data-sharing and outreach activities. Our research projects span Internet topology, routing, traffic, security and stability, future Internet architecture, economics and policy. Our infrastructure activities support measurement-based Internet studies, both at CAIDA and around the world, with focus on the health and integrity of the global Internet ecosystem.
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The Named Data Networking project recently published the NDN-NP annual report covering activities from May 2014 through April 2015.

V. Jacobson, J. Burke, L. Zhang, B. Zhang, K. Claffy, C. Papadopoulos, T. Abdelzaher, L. Wang, J. Halderman, and P. Crowley, “Named Data Networking Next Phase (NDN-NP) Project May 2014 – April 2015 Annual Report”, Tech. rep., Jun 2015.

This report catalogs a wide range of our accomplishments during the first year of the “NDN Next Phase (NDN-NP)” project. This phase of the project is environment-driven, in that we are focusing on deploying and evaluating the NDN architecture in two specific environments: building automation management systems and mobile health, together with a cluster of multimedia collaboration tools.

The final report for our Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE2014) is available for viewing. The abstract:

On December 10-11 2014, we hosted the 4th interdisciplinary Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE) at the UC San Diego’s Supercomputer Center. This workshop series provides a forum for researchers, Internet facilities and service providers, technologists, economists, theorists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to inform current and emerging regulatory and policy debates. The objective for this year’s workshop was a structured consideration of whether and how policy-makers should try to shape the future of the Internet. To structure the discussion about policy, we began the workshop with a list of potential aspirations for our future telecommunications infrastructure (a list we had previously collated), and asked participants to articulate an aspiration or fear they had about the future of the Internet, which we summarized and discussed on the second day. The focus on aspirations was motivated by the high-level observation that before discussing regulation, we must agree on the objective of the regulation, and why the intended outcome is justified. In parallel, we used a similar format as in previous years: a series of focused sessions, where 3-4 presenters each prepared 10-minute talks on issues in recent regulatory discourse, followed by in-depth discussions. This report highlights the discussions and presents relevant open research questions identified by participants.

See the full workshop report at http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2015/wie2014_report/

Slides from workshop presentations are available at http://www.caida.org/workshops/wie/1412/

Draft white paper that motivated the workshop at:
http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2015/inventory_aspirations_internets_future/

I feel that somewhere up there Jon Postel is smiling about Matthew’s RFC 7514, published today:

The deployment of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) [RFC3168] remains stalled. While most operating systems support ECN, it is currently disabled by default because of fears that enabling ECN will break transport protocols. This document proposes a new ICMP message that a router or host may use to advise a host to reduce the rate at which it sends, in cases where the host ignores other signals such as packet loss and ECN. We call this message the “Really Explicit Congestion Notification” (RECN) message because it delivers a less subtle indication of congestion than packet loss and ECN.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7514.txt

Last weekend I had the honor of participating in a conference on “The Digital Broadband Migration: First Principles for a Twenty First Century Innovation Policy” hosted by the Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado. David Clark and I kicked off a panel on the topic of “Mapping the Technological Frontier and the Sources of Innovation”. The full video is archived on YouTube (slides here). A great conference hosted by a great organization (and a law school that seems like a wonderful place to teach and learn).

The report for the 1st NDN Community Meeting (NDNcomm) is available online now. This report, “The First Named Data Networking Community Meeting (NDNcomm)“, is a brief summary of the first NDN Community Meeting held at UCLA in Los Angeles, California on September 4-5, 2014. The meeting provided a platform for the attendees from 39 institutions across seven countries to exchange their recent NDN research and development results, to debate existing and proposed functionality in security support, and to provide feedback into the NDN architecture design evolution.

The workshop was supported by the National Science Foundation CNS-1457074, CNS-1345286, and CNS-1345318. We thank the NDNcomm Program Committee members for their effort of putting together an excellent program. We thank all participants for their insights and feedback at the workshop.

Today I participated as a panelist in the Internet Regulation 2020 hosted by Duke Law’s Center for Innovation Policy at the National Academy of Sciences. The questions for my panel were:

What are the most significant realistic changes in network architecture, capacity, and connectivity by 2020? In what ways might these developments be affected, perhaps even precluded, by regulatory policy? In what ways might these developments in turn affect regulatory policy? What are the costs and benefits of these developments and their possible regulation?

My slides (which link to related reading on last slide):

http://www.caida.org/publications/presentations/2014/internet_architecture_innovation_duke/

Internet researchers and metadata enthusiasts,

In response to feedback and guidance from contributors and users, we continue to refine the Internet Measurement Data Catalog (DatCat). To encourage additional contributions, we have streamlined the DatCat data model and minimized the number of required metadata fields. Specifically, we eliminated the Data and Package objects and merged their most important information into relevant Collections. We also made dozens of other little improvements all over the code base.

We invite folks to browse the catalog, create an account, and contribute some metadata to the catalog to help document the existence and availability of Internet measurement data.

Cheers.

We finally published our new Program Plan for 2014-2017. (Previous program plans are at http://www.caida.org/home/about/progplan.) Executive summary below:

Executive summary:

This program plan outlines CAIDA’s anticipated activities for 2014-2017, in the areas of research, infrastructure, data collection and analysis to support the research community. Our research projects span Internet topology, routing, security, economics, future Internet architectures, and policy. We will continue to pursue Internet cartography, improving our IPv4 and IPv6 topology mapping capabilities using our expanding and extensible Ark measurement infrastructure. We will improve the accuracy and sophistication of our topology annotation capabilities, including economic information and business relationships between ISPs. Using our evolving alias resolution measurement system, which integrates and improves on the best available technology for IP address alias resolution, we will continue to collect, curate, and release our Internet Topology Data Kit (ITDK), including simplified versions that are easier for researchers to use.

We will use this infrastructure and rich data sets to support a new project: Mapping Interconnection in the Internet: Colocation, Connectivity and Congestion. The goal of this project is to characterize the changing nature of the Internet’s topology and traffic dynamics, and to investigate the implications of these changes on network science, architecture, operations, and public policy. We will construct a new type of semantically rich Internet map to guide a study of congestion induced by evolving peering and traffic management practices of CDNs and ISPs, including methods to detect and localize the congestion to specific points in wired (and hopefully eventually mobile) networks. Ark will also support our ongoing (entering its third year) project to study large-scale disruptions of Internet connectivity via correlation of a variety of disparate sources of data; We will have a outage-detection system operational by the end of 2015. Finally, we will extend our participation in future Internet research in two dimensions: measuring and modeling IPv6 deployment; and an expanded role in the Named Data Networking project, one of the NSF-funded future Internet architecture projects headed into its fourth year.

Our infrastructure activities include developing, deploying, and operating an active measurement platform that cost-effectively supports global Internet research and security vulnerability analysis. We will expand our software infrastructure activities to include a system for allowing measurement of compliance with BCP38 (ingress filtering best practices) across government, research, and commercial networks, and analysis of resulting data. We will expand our data sharing efforts, making older topology and some traffic data sets public that used to be restricted to academic researchers. As always, we will lead and participate in tool development to support measurement, analysis, indexing, and dissemination of data from operational global Internet infrastructure. Our outreach activities will include peer-reviewed papers, workshops, blogging, presentations, and technical reports.

Note that not all of the activities described in this program plan are fully funded yet; we are seeking additional support to enable us to accomplish our ambitious agenda.

Finally, we are taking this opportunity of reflection and strategic planning to change the expansion of CAIDA’s acronym to more accurately match what we do. Effective this month we will be the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis.

Our annual reports are at http://www.caida.org/home/about/annualreports/. This program plan is available at http://www.caida.org/home/about/progplan/. Feedback and questions are welcome at info at caida.org.

Complete program plan for 2014-2017 at: http://www.caida.org/home/about/progplan/progplan2014/.