NeTS: Large: Collaborative Research: Location-Independent Networks: Evaluation Strategies and Studies

随着全球互联网的扩张，以满足世界上越来越多的人口的需求和期望，其互联结构、流量动态以及生态系统中不同参与者的经济和政治权力正在发生深刻变化。这些变化不仅影响网络工程和运营，还给技术投资、未来网络设计、公共政策和互联网本身的科学研究带来了更广泛的挑战。然而，从科学和政策的角度来看，不断发展的生态系统在很大程度上是一个未知的领域。互联网生态系统的两个相关转型推动了这一项目：互联网交换(IXE)作为互联网络中的锚点的出现，以及内容提供商和内容交付网络(CDN)作为流入互联网的主要流量来源。根据某些统计，北美超过一半的流量现在仅来自两家内容发行商(YouTube和Netflix)。这种转变构成了生态系统中一种新的层次结构的兴起，给需要管理其网络上的流量以最大限度地减少拥塞的现有参与者带来了新的限制，导致商业参与者之间以及私营部门和监管机构之间的争斗，代价是用户体验质量下降。该项目的目标是表征互联网拓扑和流量动态变化的性质，并调查这些变化对网络科学、架构、运营和公共政策的影响。第一个任务是构建一种新型的语义丰富的互联网地图，它将阐明IXE在促进健壮的、地理上多样的但复杂的域间连接方面的作用。这张图将指导第二项任务：对CDN和互联网服务提供商不断发展的对等和流量管理做法引起的交通拥堵动态进行测量研究，包括检测和定位网络中特定点的拥堵的方法。使用的数据将包括使用CAIDA全球主动测量基础设施群岛(ARK)收集的测量数据，以及行业参与者提供的用于验证和改进方法的数据。最终，该项目将通过开发和应用更复杂的物理互联网拓扑模型来促进科学界对不断发展的互联网的理解。调查旨在寻求新的分析方法，深入了解CDN动态、IXE互联和网络性能之间的交互作用。结果，包括共享收集和管理的数据集，还将向相关领域提供信息，包括流量建模、基础设施弹性和保护、网络经济学、产业组织和未来网络架构设计。此外，结果将通过出版物、会议、行业会议、在线讲座和网页传播。CAIDA和CSAIL将联合主办年度国际跨学科研讨会，以结束实证研究结果、理论建模活动和政策制定之间的循环。通过提供关于不断发展的互联网生态系统的不偏不倚的数据，拟议的研究可能对互联网用户、网络运营商和政府具有重要价值。

As the global Internet expands to satisfy the demands and expectations of an ever-increasing fraction of the world's population, profound changes are occurring in its interconnection structure, traffic dynamics, and the economic and political power of different players in the ecosystem. These changes not only impact network engineering and operations, but also present broader challenges for technology investment, future network design, public policy, and scientific study of the Internet itself. And yet, from both scientific and policy perspectives, the evolving ecosystem is largely uncharted territory.Two related transformations of the Internet ecosystem motivate this project: the emergence of Internet exchanges (IXes) as anchor points in the mesh of interconnection, and content providers and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) as major sources of traffic flowing into the Internet. By some accounts over half the traffic volume in North America now comes from just two content distributors (Youtube and Netflix). This shift constitutes the rise of a new kind of hierarchy in the ecosystem, bringing new constraints on existing players who need to manage traffic on their networks to minimize congestion, resulting in tussles among commercial players as well as between the private sector and regulatory bodies, at the expense of users suffering degraded quality of experience.The goal of this project is to characterize the changing nature of the Internet's topology and traffic dynamics, and to investigate the implications of these changes on network science, architecture, operations, and public policy. The first task is to construct a new type of semantically rich Internet map, which will elucidate the role of IXes in facilitating robust and geographically diverse but complex interdomain connectivity. This map will guide the second task: a measurement study of traffic congestion dynamics induced by evolving peering and traffic management practices of CDNs and ISPs, including methods to detect and localize the congestion to specific points in the network. Data used will include measurements gathered using CAIDA's global active measurement infrastructure Archipelago (Ark), as well as data contributed by industry players for use in validation and refinement of methods.Ultimately, this project will advance the scientific community's understanding of the evolving Internet by developing and applying a more sophisticated model of the physical Internet topology. The inquiry is structured to pursue new methods of analysis and insights into the interaction between CDN dynamics, interconnection at IXes, and network performance. Results, including the sharing of collected and curated data sets, will also inform related fields, including traffic modeling, infrastructure resiliency and protection, network economics, industrial organization, and future network architecture design.Additionally, results will be disseminated via publications, conferences, industry meetings, online lectures, web pages. CAIDA and CSAIL will jointly host annual international interdisciplinary workshops to close the loop between empirical research results, theoretical modeling activities, and policymaking. By providing unbiased data about the evolving Internet ecosystem, the proposed research has the potential to be of great value to Internet users, network operators, and governments.