As part of our NSF-funded network research project on modeling Internet interconnection dynamics, David Clark (MIT) and I hosted the second Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE2012) last December 12-13. The goal of the workshop was to provide a forum for researchers, commercial Internet facilities and service providers, technologists, economists, theorists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to empirically inform emerging regulatory and policy debates. The theme for this year’s workshop was “Definitions and Data”. The final report describes the discussions and presents relevant open research questions identified by workshop participants. Slides presented at the workshop are available at the workshop home page. From the intro (but the full report (6-page pdf) is worth reading):
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[This blog entry is guest written by Robert Beverly at the Naval Postgraduate School.]

In many respects, the deployment, adoption, use, and performance of IPv6 has received more recent attention than IPv4. Certainly the longitudinal measurement of IPv6, from its infancy to the exhaustion of ICANN v4 space to native 1% penetration (as observed by Google), is more complete than IPv4. Indeed, there are many vested parties in (either the success or failure) of IPv6, and numerous IPv6 measurement efforts afoot.

Researchers from Akamai, CAIDA, ICSI, NPS, and MIT met in early January, 2013 to firstly share and make sense of current measurement initiatives, while secondly plotting a path forward for the community in measuring IPv6. A specific objective of the meeting was to understand which aspects of IPv6 measurement are “done” (in the sense that there exists a sound methodology, even if measurement should continue), and which IPv6 questions/measurements remain open research problems. The meeting agenda and presentation slides are archived online.

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Last week CAIDA researchers (Alberto and kc) visited National Harbor (Maryland) for the 1st NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Principal Investigators Meeting. The National Science Foundation’s SATC program is an interdisciplinary expansion of the old Trustworthy Computing program sponsored by CISE, extended to include the SBE, MPS, and EHR directorates. The SATC program also includes a bold new Transition to Practice category of project funding — to address the challenge of moving from research to capability — which we are excited and honored to be a part of.

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This month CCR published final reports from two our of workshops: our BGP/traceroute workshop last July 2011 (final report here or here) and AIMS-4 last February (final report here or here).

[Executive Summary from our annual report for 2011.]

This annual report covers CAIDA’s activities in 2011, summarizing highlights from our research, infrastructure, data-sharing and outreach activities. Our current research projects span topology, routing, traffic, economics, future Internet architectures, and policy. Our infrastructure activities continue to support 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 systems. We are also dedicating resources to support the infrastructure measurement and data sharing interests and needs of two U.S. federal agency programs: the National Science Foundation’s International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Protected Repository of Data on Internet CyberThreats (PREDICT) data-sharing project.

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The final report for our workshop on Active Internet Measurements (ISMA 2011 AIMS-3) is available for viewing. The abstract:

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[Executive Summary from our annual report for 2010.]

This annual report covers CAIDA’s activities in 2010, summarizing highlights from our research, infrastructure, data-sharing and outreach activities. Our current research projects span topology, routing, traffic, economics, and policy. Our infrastructure activities support 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 systems.

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Many applications require the association of Internet numbering resources with an accurate geographic label at some granularity. For some applications, knowing the country of origin might be sufficient; for others a more precise indication at state, city or zip code granularity, or even a specific latitude/longitude is needed.

However, which method(s) work best? Which database sources and services are most reliable, at what geographic resolutions? If a data source provides the geographic location of the owner of an IP address, is this location the same as the location where the device is actually broadcasting and receiving packets? And, if different, can the difference be quantified?

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[Executive Summary from our annual report for 2009, which took longer than we expected to finish this year as we’ve been overly busy with material for 2010’s report..]

Our current research projects span topology, routing, traffic, economics, and policy. Our infrastructure activities support 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 systems.

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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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