The Named Data Networking project recently published the NDN-NP annual report covering activities from May 2015 through April 2016.).

V. Jacobson, J. Burke, L. Zhang, T. Abdelzaher, B. Zhang, k. claffy, P. Crowley, J. Halderman, C. Papadopoulos, and L. Wang, “Named Data Networking Next Phase (NDN-NP) Project May 2015 – April 2016 Annual Report”, Tech. rep., Named Data Networking (NDN), Jun 2016.

This report summarizes our accomplishments during the second year of the Named Data Networking Next Phase (NDN-NP) project (the 5th year of the overall project. This phase of the project focuses on deploying and evaluating the NDN architecture in four environments: building automation management systems, mobile health, multimedia real-time conferencing tools, and scientific data applications. Implementation and testing of pilot applications in these network environments further demonstrated our research progress in namespace design, trust management, and encryption-based access control. Highlights from this year include:

1. Continued evolution the NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD), to support application-driven experimentation with new NDN protocol features.
2. Development of an Android version of NFD to promote NDN experimentation on mobile platforms.
3. Implementation of a new transport protocol (InfoMax) that can intelligently filter streams of information in order to reduce transmitted data volume, while minimizing loss of information.
4. A growing portfolio of supporting software libraries, including new APIs, transport mechanisms (Sync, information maximization), and security functionality, that leverage inherent capabilities of NDN, e.g., schematized trust, name-based access control.
5. Demonstration of extremely scalable forwarding implementation using a billion synthetic names.
6. Implementation and evaluation of hyperbolic routing
   performance to understand its feasibility in supporting NDN’s
   interdomain routing.

7. Multi-faceted evaluation of the architecture, from
   instrumentation of applications on the testbed, to uses of ndnSIM and the Mini-NDN emulator environment.

8. Continued uses of NDN in the four courses taught by principal investigators.
9. The second annual NDN Community meeting hosted by the
   NDN Consortium to promote a vibrant open source ecosystem of
   research and experimentation around NDN.

The NDN team has made tremendous progress in the last five years, and a larger community of information-centric networking research has evolved in parallel. Our progress revealed the importance of demonstrating NDN capabilities in IoT and big data environments, and highlighted the need for accessible software platform support and emulation capabilities to facilitate R\&D on both the NDN architecture and applications that leverage it. We have received a year of supplement funding to complete four tasks: 1) completing and disseminating native NDN applications and associated design patterns, 2) demonstrating NDN scalability; 3) documenting and releasing reference implementations, and 4) documenting NDN design decisions and lessons learned.

In the past year, we have made substantial progress on a system to measure congestion on interdomain links between networks. This effort is part of our NSF-funded project on measuring interdomain connectivity and congestion. The basic nugget of our technique is to send TTL-limited probes from a vantage point (VP) within a network, toward the near and the far end of an interdomain (border) link of that network, and to monitor diurnal patterns in the near and far-side time series. We refer to this method as “Time-Series Latency Probing”, or TSLP. Our hypothesis is that a persistently elevated RTT to the far end of the link, but no corresponding RTT elevation to the near side, is a signal of congestion at the interdomain link.

It turns out that identifying interdomain links from a VP inside a network is surprisingly challenging, for several reasons: lack of standard IP address assignment practices for inter domain links; unadvertised address space by ISPs; and myriad things that can go wrong with traceroute measurements (third-party addresses, unresponsive routers). See our paper at the 2014 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) for a description of these issues. To overcome those challenges and identify network borders from within a network, we have developed bdrmap, an active measurement tool to accurately identify interdomain links between networks. A paper describing the bdrmap algorithms is currently under submission to IMC 2016.

Our second major activity in the last year has been to develop a backend system that manages TSLP probing from our set of distributed vantage points, collects and organizes data, and presents that data for easy analysis and visualization. A major goal of the backend system is to be adaptive, i.e., the probing state should adapt to topological and routing changes in the network. To this end, we run the bdrmap topology discovery process continuously on each VP. Every day, we process completed bdrmap runs from each monitor and add newly discovered interdomain links or update the probing state for existing links (i.e., destinations we can use to probe those links, and the distance of those links from our VP). We then push updated probing lists to the monitor. This adaptive process ensures that we always probe a relatively current state of thousands of interdomain links visible from our VPs.

Third, we have greatly expanded the scale of our measurement system. We started this project in 2014 with an initial set of approximately ten VPs in 5-6 access networks mostly in the United States. We are now running congestion measurements from over sixty Archipelago VPs in 39 networks and 26 countries around the world. Our Ark VPs have sufficient memory and compute power to run both the border mapping process and the TSLP probing without any issues. However, when we looked into porting our measurements to other active measurement platforms such as Bismark or the FCC’s measurement infrastructure operated by SamKnows, we found that the OpenWRT-based home routers were too resource-constrained to run bdrmap and TSLP directly. To overcome this challenge, we developed a method to move the bulk of the resource-intensive processing from the VPs to a central controller at CAIDA, so the VP only has to run an efficient probing engine (scamper) with a small memory footprint and low CPU usage. We have deployed a test set of 15 Bismark home routers in this type of remote configuration, with lots of help from the folks at the Bismark Project. Our next target deployment will be a set of >5000 home routers that are part of the FCC-SamKnows Measuring Broadband America infrastructure.

A fourth major advance we have made in the last year is in visualization and analysis of the generated time series data. We were on the lookout for a time series database to store, process and visualize the TSLP data. After some initial experimentation, we found influxDB to be well-suited to our needs, due to its ability to scale to millions of time series, scalable and usable read/write API, and SQL-like querying capability. We also discovered Grafana, a graphing frontend that integrates seamlessly with the influxDB database to provide interactive querying and graphing capability. Visualizing time series plots from a given VP to various neighbor networks and browsing hundreds of time series plots is now possible with a few mouse clicks on the Grafana UI. The figure below shows RTT data for 7 interdomain links between a U.S. access provider and a content provider over the course of a week. This graph took a few minutes to produce with influxDB and Grafana; previously this data exploration would have taken hours using data stored in standard relational databases.

As the cherry on the cake, we have set up the entire system to provide a near real-time view of congestion events. TSLP data is pulled off our VPs and indexed into the influxDB database within 30 minutes of being generated. Grafana provides an auto-refresh mode wherein we can set up a dashboard to periodically refresh when new data is available. There is no technical barrier to shortening the 30-minute duration to an arbitrarily short duration, within reason. The figure below shows a pre-configured dashboard with the real-time congestion state of interdomain links from 5 large access networks in the US to 3 different content providers/CDNs (network names anonymized). Several graphs on that dashboard show a diurnal pattern that signals evidence of congestion on the interdomain link. While drawing pretty pictures and having everything run faster is certainly satisfying, it is neither the goal nor the most challenging aspect of this project. A visualization is only as good as the data that goes into it. Drawing graphs was the easy part; developing a sustainable and scalable system that will keep producing meaningful data was infinitely more challenging. We are delighted with where we are at the moment, and look forward to opening up the data exploration interface for external users.

So what happens next? We are far from done here. We are currently working on data analysis modules for time series data with the goal of producing alarms, automatically and without human intervention, that indicate evidence of congestion. Those alarms will be input to a reactive measurement system that we have developed to distribute on-demand measurement tasks to VPs. We envision different types of reactive measurement tasks, e.g., confirming the latency-based evidence of congestion by launching probes to measure loss rate, estimating the impact on achievable throughput by running NDT tests, or estimating potential impacts to user Quality of Experience (QoE). The diagram below shows the various components of the measurement system we are developing. The major piece that remains is continuous analysis of the TSLP data, generating alarms, and pushing on-demand measurements to the reactive measurement system. Stay tuned!

The team: Amogh Dhamdhere, Matthew Luckie, Alex Gamero-Garrido, Bradley Huffaker, kc claffy, Steve Bauer, David Clark

We just learned our colleagues Timur Friedman (UPMC) and Renata Teixeira (INRIA) and Timur Friedman (UPMC) are teaching a new course: “Internet Measurements: a Hands-on Introduction.” The course will be available from May 23rd to June 19th, 2016 on the platform France Université Numérique (FUN).

This free online course, taught in English, will cover internet measurement basics including network topology and routes; connectivity, losses, latency, and geolocation; bandwidth; and traffic measurements; with hands-on exercises on PlanetLab Europe.
Students of this course will ideally have a level of understanding of internet technology that comes from an advanced undergraduate course or a first Masters course in networking, or equivalent professional experience.

Registration and details available at https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41011/session01/about

We set out to conduct a social experiment of sorts, to host a hackathon to hack streaming BGP data. We had no idea we would get such an enthusiastic reaction from the community and that we would reach capacity. We were pleasantly surprised at the response to our invitations when 25 experts came to interact with 50 researchers and practitioners (30 of whom were graduate students). We felt honored to have participants from 15 countries around the world and experts from companies such as Cisco, Comcast, Google, Facebook and NTT, who came to share their knowledge and to help guide and assist our challenge teams.

Having so many domain experts from so many institutions and companies with deep technical understanding of the BGP ecosystem together in one room greatly increased the kinetic potential for what we might accomplish over the course of our two days.

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When visualizing the Internet, one can consider several different levels of abstraction, including the Internet Protocal (IP) address, router, and Autonomous System (AS) levels. IP addresses identify interfaces on devices that connect to the Internet. Routers are devices that route traffic by accepting it on one interface and forwarding it out another interface. (Routers may have many interfaces.) An Autonomous Systems (AS) is a set of IP addresses operated under a single administrative umbrella. The three granularities are illustrated below:

Most Internet mapping methods have focused on characterizing and modeling network structure at the level of interconnected Autonomous Systems (ASes). We have developed different ways to annotate ASes, using a variety of available datasets, to support visualizations of AS topology:
.

I gave a class lecture at UCSD in January 2016 on visualizing Internet AS topology. I also prepared a supplemental data set to facilitate student exploration and experimentation. Comments and feedback welcome!

We are pleased to post the attendees list for the upcoming CAIDA BGP Hackathon 2016 organized jointly with Colorado State University, University of Southern California, University of Waikato, the Route Views Project, RIPE NCC, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and FORTH. We look forward to hosting over 80 attendees — including more than 20 domain experts — from over 50 organizations who will come from around the world to participate in the first CAIDA BGP Hackathon at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego in La Jolla, CA. The hackathon is sponsored by industry, professional organizations, and government agencies, with interest in promoting the development of tools to model, measure, and monitor the routing infrastructure of the Internet. This support allowed us to to provide 33 travel grants.

Due to the overwhelming interest in the hackathon, we have reached capacity. We are no longer accepting applications for this year’s hackathon.

We would like to give special thanks to our sponsors.

• ACM SIGCOMM
• Cisco
• Comcast
• Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
• Google NetOps and Google Open Source Research Group
• The Internet Society (ISOC)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• San Diego Supercomputer Center

Please send any questions or media inquiries regarding the hackathon to bgp-hackathon-info at caida dot org.

The report for the Second NDN Community Meeting (NDNcomm 2015) is available online now. The meeting, held at UCLA in Los Angeles, California on September 28-29, 2015, provided a platform for attendees from 63 institutions across 13 countries to exchange recent NDN research and development results, to debate existing and proposed functionality in NDN forwarding, routing, and security, and to provide feedback to the NDN architecture design evolution.

[The workshop was partially supported by the National Science Foundation CNS-1345286, CNS-1345318, and CNS-1457074. 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.]

Nothing feels better than publishing fresh data for the research community, especially when fresh brings new features. Today, CAIDA released the August 2015 version of our popular Internet Topology Data Kit (ITDK) that includes topologies for both IPv4 and IPv6. CAIDA’s ITDK provides researchers with data that describes connectivity and routing observations gathered from a large cross-section of the global Internet. This dataset enables the study of the topology of the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet at the router-level with inferences for assignments of routers to Autonomous Systems (AS). The August 2015 release of the ITDK includes two related IPv4 router-level topologies; an IPv6 router-level topology; assignments of routers to ASes; geographic locations of each router; and Domain Name Service (DNS) lookups of all observed IP addresses.

We produce the ITDKs from active measurements conducted on our Archipelago (Ark) measurement infrastructure. This release made use of 94 Ark monitors located in 36 countries to produce the IPv4 topologies and 26 monitors located in 15 countries for the IPv6 topology.

CAIDA restricts access to recent ITDKs less than two years old. CAIDA provides unrestricted public access to ITDKs older than two years.

For complete details about the ITDK collection process, data files and formats, data availability, and more, please see Macroscopic Internet Topology Data Kit (ITDK).

We recently posted two papers on policy that are worth highlighting:

Anchoring policy development around stable points: an approach to regulating the co-evolving ICT ecosystem, published in Telecommunications Policy, Aug 2015.

Abstract:

The daunting pace of innovation in the information and communications technology (ICT) landscape, a landscape of technology and business structure, is a well-known but under-appreciated reality. In contrast, the rate of policy and regulatory innovation is much slower, partly due to its inherently more deliberative character. We describe this disparity in terms of the natural rates of change in different parts of the ecosystem, and examine why it has impeded attempts to impose effective regulation on the telecommunications industry. We explain why a recent movement to reduce this disparity by increasing the pace of regulation – adaptive regulation – faces five obstacles that may hinder its feasibility in the ICT ecosystem. As a means to achieve more sustainable regulatory frameworks for ICT industries, we introduce an approach based on finding stable points in the system architecture. We explore the origin and role of these stable points in a rapidly evolving system, and argue that they can provide a means to support development of policies, including adaptive regulation approaches, that are more likely to survive the rapid pace of evolution in technology.

Full paper available on the CAIDA website.
Accompanying slides are also available.

Adding Enhanced Services to the Internet: Lessons from History
Presented at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC), Sep 2015.

Abstract:

We revisit the last 35 years of history related to the design and specification of Quality of Service (QoS) on the Internet, in hopes of offering some clarity to the current debates around service differentiation. We describe the continual failure to get QoS capabilities deployed on the public Internet, including the technical challenges of the 1980s and 1990s, the market-oriented (business) challenges of the 1990s and 2000s, and recent regulatory challenges. Our historical perspective draws on, among other things, our own work from the 1990s that offered proposals for supporting enhanced services using the Internet Protocol (IP) suite, and our attempts to engage both industry and policymakers in understanding the dynamics of the Internet ecosystem. In short, the engineering community successfully developed protocols and mechanisms to implement enhanced services (QoS), and a few individual service providers have deployed them internally or in trusted two-party scenarios. The long-standing failure has been to deploy this capability across the public Internet.

We reflect on lessons learned from the history of this failure, the resulting tensions and risks, and their implications for the future of Internet infrastructure regulation. First, the continued failure of QoS over the last three decades derives from political and economic (business) obstacles as well as technical obstacles. The competitive nature of the industry, and a long history of anti-trust regulation (at least in the U.S.) conflicts with the need for competing providers to agree on protocols that require sharing operational data with each other to parameterize and verify committed service qualities. Second, QoS technology can yield benefits as well as harms, so policymaking should focus on harms rather than mechanisms. To assure the benefit to consumers, regulators may need to require transparency about the state of congestion and provisioning on networks using such mechanisms. Third, using QoE as the basis for any regulation will require research, tools and capabilities to measure, quantify, and characterize QoE, and developing metrics of service quality that better reflect our understanding of QoS and QoE for a range of applications. Finally, profound shifts in interconnection arrangements suggest a reshaping of the debate over QoS on the public Internet. Some access networks are interconnecting their private IP-based network platforms to support enhanced services, and using this interconnected platform to vertically integrate infrastructure and applications. Access networks are also connecting directly to large content providers to minimize the risk of performance impairments. These changes trigger new regulatory concerns over the fate of the public Internet, including capital investment incentives and gaps across different bodies of law.

Barriers to the deployment of scalable interprovider QoS may be unsurmountable, but since any Internet of the future will face them, it is worth developing a systematic understanding to the challenge of enhanced services, and documenting successes and failures over the history of the Internet as carefully as possible.

Full paper available on the CAIDA website.

Earlier this month, Marina and I went to our first Principal Investigators meeting for a new DHS program on distributed denial of service defense (DDoS Defense), lead by DHS S&T Cybersecurity Division Program Manager Dan Massey. Dan is one of Doug Maughan’s team, and he seems to have picked up Doug’s impressive talent for running effective meetings. I presented these slides on our new spoofer project, a collaboration with Dr. Matthew Luckie, now a senior lecturer at U. Waikato, and Rob Beverly at NPS.