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Internet topology measurement

Yuval Shavitt
School of Electrical Engineering
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Date & time: Tuesday, June 14, 2005, 9:00-13:00
Location: Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, room: Teleconferencing Room (TCR)

ABSTRACT

The Internet is a vital tool in all aspects of today’s life. However, its operation is far from been optimal, and in some cases satisfactory. In order to understand its operation and suggest ways to improve it, one needs to know the fundamental characteristics of the interactions in the network at all levels: packets, flows, devices, and entire networks. However, the Internet was not built with measurement as a fundamental feature, thus tools and techniques had to be built to enable measuring and analyzing various aspects of its operations.

This tutorial will give the participants a review of Internet measurement techniques at various
levels. After a short review of basic Internet features, we will discuss the reasons
for measuring the Internet, what can be measured, how, where and when can it be done,
with examples from previous projects. The tutorial will also touch on modeling issues.
A large part of the tutorial will focus on topology measurements, and will discuss
the main challenges in this area.

TUTORIAL OUTLINE

• Introduction:
  • Motivation for measuring the Internet,
  • short overview of the Internet structure,
  • short overview of layering,
  • Internet measurement classification.
• Simple active measurement techniques:
  • Connectivity, delay, loss, bandwidth
• Passive measurement techniques
  • TCP analysis: out-of-sequence events
  • Traffic analysis
• Topology discovery
  • Issues in router level topologies discovery using traceroute
  • Issues in AS level topologies discovery using traceroute
  • Challenges in PoP level topology identification
• Delay Maps
  • Issues in active delay measurements
  • High precision delay measurements
  • Issues in AS level delay maps
• Example projects
  • Skitter: traceroute based topology discovery
  • Route Views: BGP based topology discovery
  • Other projects in brief: Surveyor, Scriptroute, and more
  • DIMES: traceroute based distributed topology discovery and monitoring

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Yuval Shavitt received the B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (cum laude), M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, and D.Sc. from the Technion --- Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel in 1986, 1992, and 1996, respectively.

From 1986 to 1991, he served in the Israel Defense Forces first as a system engineer and the last two years as a software engineering team leader. After graduation he spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Between 1997 and 2001 He was a Member of Technical Stuff at the Networking Research Laboratory at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Holmdel, NJ. Starting October 2000, Dr. Shavitt is a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering --- Systems at Tel-Aviv University.

He published 25 journal papers and over 40 conference papers, and holds close to 10 US, Canadian, European and Japanese patents. Dr. Shavitt served as TPC member for INFOCOM 2000 - 2003, 2005, IWQoS 2001 and 2002, ICNP 2001, MMNS 2001, and IWAN 2002 - 2004, and on the executive committee of INFOCOM 2000, 2002, and 2003. He is also the organizer of a DIMACS Workshop on Internet and WWW Measurement, Mapping and Modeling, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA, February, 2002, and the International Workshop on New Advances of Web Server and Proxy Technologies, Providence, RI, USA, May 2003. He served as a leading guest editor of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications special issue on Internet and WWW Measurement, Mapping, and Modeling; and as a co-editor of a special issue on Web Servers and Content Distribution Networks (CDN) in the Journal of World Wide Web: Internet and Web Information Systems. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Dr. Shavitt was involved in the design of the IDMaps (Internet distance maps) project and is now leading the DIMES project to map and monitor the Internet using distributed software agents. DIMES, which was launched in September 2004, has increased the know AS level Internet connectivity by about 25% in its first six month of operation.

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