In pursuit of more rigorous data on IPv6 deployment, CAIDA has undertaken four IPv6 measurement and analysis exercises: address allocation data; traceroute-based topology; DNS queries from root servers; and a global survey of network operators in 2008.
[Last month, I remotely attended the second meeting of the FCC’s current Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), where chairs of several working groups set up at the first meeting (in November) reported on their progress and plans. I’m a member of the FCC TAC’s IPv6 working group, (more on this soon), and so far have been asked to answer two questions I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years: what data do we have to gauge IPv6 deployment by Internet service providers, and what data do we need? Last November I addressed the first question in a (still pending) NSF proposal to measure IPv6 deployment, with the following text. I’ll post some updates shortly.]
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?
This month Internet2’s new UCAN project issued a call for white papers on how they could use their $65M BTOP grant in operationally sustainable ways, i.e., so the infrastructure they build will have a chance of surviving when the federal stimulus project money runs out.
We held a relevant workshop 5 years ago, part of which was published in CommLaw the following year. I’ve also written several other essays on related issues:
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.
Most of the information already published about Internet connectivity in the Middle East has been based on four types of data:
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.
My recently submitted public comments on the increasingly controversial issue of ICANN’s plans to expand the generic Top Level Domain namespace indefinitely:
Among the interesting meetings I attended in 2010 was the principal investigators (PI) meeting for NSF’s new “Future Internet Architecture” (FIA) program. The FIA program builds on the successes of NSF’s previous Future Internet Design (FIND) program, the recommendations of a review panel, and a community summit in October 2009. (The FIND program itself has been integrated into NSF’s new Network Science and Engineering research program, while the four FIA teams are attempting to implement some of the ideas developed thus far.) CAIDA is participating in one of these projects — Named Data Networking (NDN), led by Van Jacobson at Xerox Parc and Lixia Zhang at UCLA. (Background links to 2010 technical report describing the proposed architecture, Van’s August 2006 video lecture and 2009 ACM Queue Q&A on NDN ideas.)
I recently attended my first FCC Technological Advisory Council meeting (video archives). A week before the meeting we received a memo from the chairman of the committee (Tom Wheeler) notifying the committee of a “clear and challenging mandate from Chairman Genachowski: to generate ideas and spur actions that lead to job creation and economic growth in the ICT [information and communication technologies] ecosystem.” Specifically, “The TAC will focus on the short term implementation of innovative ideas to create investment and jobs, as opposed to long term regulatory changes.”
[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.