Systems Seminar: Mark Crovella, Boston University

On the Geographic Location of Internet Resources

Abstract

In a surprisingly short period of time, the Internet has deeply interpenetrated human society and become an electronic skin covering the Earth. Despite its immense importance, our scientific knowledge of the structure of the Internet is surprisingly thin. In particular, one relatively unexplored question about the Internet's physical structure concerns the geographical location of its components: routers, links and autonomous systems (ASs).

In this talk I'll describe our recent study of this question. We use two large inventories of Internet routers and links, collected by different methods and about two years apart, and then map each router to its geographical location using a state-of-the-art tool. We then study the relationship between router location and population density; between geographic distance and link density; and between the size and geographic extent of ASs.

Our findings, which are consistent across the two datasets, have significant implications for representative network topology generation. We show how router density relates to population density and how distance affects the likelihood that two routers are connected. Surprisingly, our results provide evidence for one of the oldest (and least favored) models of network topology -- the Waxman model.

This is joint work with Anukool Lakhina, John Byers, and Ibrahim Matta.

Speaker Bio

Mark Crovella is Associate Professor of Computer Science on the faculty of Boston University. Since 1994 his research has focused on performance and systems issues in the Internet and the Web, publishing over 50 papers in the area --- including widely-cited work in Internet traffic measurement, discovery of Internet structure, and Web server design. He has organized conferences on Internet performance and consulted to a number of Internet-related companies. He serves on the editorial boards of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and IEEE Transactions on Computers.