Global Scale Internet Measurement and Analysis

Abstract:

Over the past decades, the Internet has grown into the largest and most complex system that has ever been created by computer scientists. However, while the Internet has been a success in many ways, its sheer size and complexity has made it difficult for network researchers and engineers to evaluate the impact that protocol changes may have on its operation. In this project, we explore a research agenda that tightly couples the measurement of the Internet with the design of new protocols. We call this approach to protocol design Measurement-Driven Protocol Design. It is the core goal of this project to use testbed-based measurements to improve the understanding of the Internet and shape its future by characterizing the operation of the current Internet infrastructure and its usage patterns.

The core premise of this project is that network measurements are critical to driving and evaluating protocol designs. As indicated in the Report of NSF Workshop on Network Research Testbeds [4]: "As the Internet has evolved, insights gained from network measurement and characterization have had considerable impact on its design -- including its protocols, components and applications". An example of such impact is our work on one of the earliest large-scale measurements of the Internet, specifically, the measurement of the official Web Server of the 1996 Olympic Games (the busiest Web site of its time). From the lessons learned from this measurement study, we developed new designs for TCP & congestion control and new services for the Internet.

People: Aditya Akella, Jeff Pang, Bruce Maggs, Srinivasan Seshan, Anees Shaikh (IBM)

Recent Publications:

An Empirical Evaluation of Wide-Area Internet Bottlenecks Aditya Akella, Srinivasan Seshan and Anees Shaikh. Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2003, Miami, Florida. Also appeared in ACM SIGMETRICS 2003, San Diego, CA as a short paper
Understanding the Impact of Route Control Product Deployment Aditya Akella Workshop on Internet Routing Evolution and Design (WIRED), Mount Hood, OR.
Towards Representative Internet Measurements Aditya Akella, Srinivasan Seshan and Anees Shaikh. 3rd New York Metro Area Networking Workshop (NYMAN 2003), New York, NY.
A Measurement-Based Analysis of Multihoming Aditya Akella, Bruce Maggs, Srinivasan Seshan, Anees Shaikh and Ramesh Sitaraman. ACM SIGCOMM 2003, Karlsruhe, Germany.
Scaling Properties of the Internet Graph Aditya Akella, Shuchi Chawla, Arvind Kannan and Srinivasan Seshan. ACM Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) 2003, Boston, MA.
Detecting DDoS Attacks on ISP Networks Aditya Akella, Ashwin Bharambe, Mike Reiter and Srinivasan Seshan. ACM SIGMOD/PODS Workshop on Management and Processing of Data Streams (MPDS), FCRC 2003, San Diego, CA.
Selfish Behavior and Stability of the Internet: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of TCP Aditya Akella, Richard Karp, Christos Papadimitriou, Srinivasan Seshan and Scott Shenker. ACM SIGCOMM 2002, Pittsburgh PA.
Mechanisms for Internet Routing: A Study Aditya Akella, Shuchi Chawla and Srinivasan Seshan. CMU SCS Technical Report Number CMU-CS-02-163.