iLENS-NP - Internet Laboratory for Empirical Network Science: Next Phase

Project Summary

The opacity of the Internet infrastructure limits the capability of research and development efforts to model network behavior and topology, design protocols and/or new architectures, and study real-world properties such as robustness, resilience, and economics. Overcoming these limitations is impossible without realistic and representative datasets, and measurement infrastructure on which to support sustained longitudinal measurements as well as new experiments.

With previous CRI (and DHS) funding we have designed, implemented, deployed, and operated a secure measurement platform, Archipelago (Ark), that supports large-scale active measurement studies of the global Internet. Since 2007 Archipelago has gathered the largest set of network topology data used for a broad spectrum of scientific research, from physics to biology, from infrastructure vulnerability assessments to theory of complex networks.

Now we propose four infrastructure development tasks aimed to lower the barrier to using the infrastructure and its data products that we curate:

Deploy a new hardware architecture that expands the scale and manageability of the infrastructure
Integrate recent measurement technology advances to enable fundamentally new scientific experiments and data sets
Upgrade the functionality of our measurement-on-demand web interface to the Ark platform to enable richer scheduling of more complex measurements
Create a new interface for browsing, querying, and visualizing the data gathered.

Improving data curation and implementing a user-friendly web-based interface to the data products require significant software and systems experience, resources, and domain knowledge, and it is exactly the sort of activity researchers do not have resources to do themselves. The results of our project will support CISE research by enabling new data products that are more compelling than before to a wide range of Internet and network research disciplines: from empirical assessments of global Internet security and stability vulnerabilities, to scientific modeling and mapping of complex networks, to retrospective and prospective studies of network architecture evolution.

Subtask	Description	Projected Timeline	Status
Task 1: Expanding Ark infrastructure		ongoing, every year
1.1	Acquire 50-60 Raspberry Pi's (30-40 in Year 3), prepare for deployment	ongoing
1.2	Identify and attract new hosting sites	ongoing
1.3	Deliver monitors to hosting sites, help deploying if necessary	ongoing
1.4	Replace obsolete or failing monitors	ongoing
1.5	Acquire and put in production new Ark compute server	Year 1, Q2	done
1.6	Enable remote management of Ark monitors	ongoing
Task 2: Integrating recent measurement and analysis advances into Ark		Years 1 & 2
2.1	Deploy prefixscan measurement technique to identify third-party artifact addresses in traceroutes		done
2.2	Infer AS peering links across IX address space	Year 1, Q3	done
2.3	Improve techniques to infer router ownership, operationalize it into ITDK	Year 2, Q1	done
Task 3: Developing user-friendly interface for conducting measurements		Years 2 & 3
3.1	Enable triggered probing on demand (i.e., for IODA)	Year 2, Q2	done
3.2	Develop interface to additional scamper measurement capabilities: MDA traceroute	Year 2, Q2	done
3.3	Implement a new visualization mode highlighting incongruities between AS paths derived from BGP and traceroutes	Year 3	done
3.4	Improve an interactive web interface to Vela based on users' experience and feedback	Year 3	done
Task 4: Developing rich interface for browsing and querying collected data		Years 1, 2, 3
4.1	Develop prototype interface for browsing collected data	Year 1	done
4.2	Develop prototype interface for querying collected data	Year 2	done
4.3	Improve interactive access to collected data based on users' experience and feedback	Year 3	ongoing
Task 5: Communal and collaborative activities		ongoing
5.1	Produce new ITDKs	every 3 to 6 months	done
5.2	Organize AIMS workshop and publish report	every year	2016, 2017
5.3	Support researchers using Ark, collect and answer their feedback	ongoing