NeTS: Small: Parallax -- Leveraging the Perspective of Ten Million Peers

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。互联网的大部分增长发生在当前测量技术和平台无法触及的领域，如NAT盒和防火墙后，或互联网上未被公共BGP提要暴露的区域。这项工作的动机是观察到，总的来说，大规模P2P系统中的对等点对网络条件具有独特而有价值的视角，而今天的研究人员、运营商和用户只能有限地访问或无法访问这种视角。P2P系统是访问这些视图的理想工具，它是最大的服务之一，覆盖了互联网的大部分。作为对互联网的被动监控，不同的P2P系统可以在部分重叠的空间和时间域上提供不同的、互补的网络视图。这项工作的目标是探索重用这些有价值的视图的潜力，研究收集、共享和利用它的技术。这项工作的重点是：确定关于这些对等点收集的网络状况的有用度量，并评估它们的重用潜力(随着时间的推移和跨多个系统的角度)，设计方法来维护这些信息，并以分散的方式使其可供其他大规模分布式系统访问，同时保护参与的对等点的隐私，以及探索可以从这些信息中受益的潜在应用。访问网络的终端主机视图将有助于了解和描述底层网络，并满足新出现的Internet服务和应用的需求。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Much of the Internet's growth occurs in domains beyond the reach of current measurement techniques and platforms, such as behind NAT boxes and firewalls or in regions of the Internet not exposed by public BGP feeds. This work is motivated by the observation that, collectively, peers in large-scale P2P systems have a unique and valuable perspective on network conditions, one to which today's researchers, operators and users have limited or no access. P2P systems are an ideal vehicle for accessing these views, being among the largest services and covering most of the Internet. As passive monitors of the Internet, different P2P systems can provide different, complementary views of the network, over partially overlapping space and time domains. The goal of this effort is to explore the potential for reusing such valuable view, investigating techniques for gathering, sharing, and exploiting it. The work focuses on: identifying useful metrics regarding network conditions collected by these peers and evaluating their potential for reuse (over time and across multiple systems' perspectives), designing approaches for maintaining this information and making it accessible to other large-scale distributed systems in a decentralized manner while preserving the privacy of the participating peers, and exploring potential applications that could benefit from this information. Access to end-host views of the network will help in the understanding and characterization of the underlying network and address the needs of new emergent Internet services and applications.