Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: A Traffic Map for the Internet

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To understand the impact of Internet events---attacks, outages, degraded performance, or newly deployed infrastructure---one must understand how they affect peoples' use of Internet services. Researchers, network and service operators, regulators, policy makers, and economists need a map of what portion of Internet use depends on the networks, routes, and servers impacted by the events: an Internet traffic map.Such a traffic map will inform other networking researchers by providing context to interpret measurement results and proposed improvements, ultimately contributing to improving the Internet for everyone. An Internet traffic map will also help regulators, policy makers, and economists assess the societal impact of networking outside computer science.Decades of network research have studied components related to---but distinct from---a traffic map, including the autonomous system (AS) and router-level topologies, Internet exchange points (IXPs), content distribution network (CDN) deployments, and general traffic matrices. Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers have their own, high-quality views of their part of the Internet traffic map, but business- and customer-sensitivities prevent public release. This project’s goal is to provide a sharable, trusted traffic map. This map traffic will be quantified—with estimates of error; broad—with estimates of completeness; and sustainable—with regular updates. This project proposes to meet this need by:• Measuring a traffic map that identifies which networks host Internet users and where popular services deploy servers for popular services, the paths between users and services, and relative activity levels on those paths. This map must be derived from replicable approaches and open data so it can be shared. Doing so will require developing new techniques. • Evaluating the accuracy of this map by comparing multiple, independent methods, and testing against external information. Comparison against accurate but privileged information will establish confidence in open-source techniques. • Providing regularly-updated maps to the research community and tools that allow others to create their own maps.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.