The Policy Potential of Measuring Internet Outages
John Heidemann, Yuri Pradkin and Guillermo Baltra
USC/Information Sciences Institute
Citation
John Heidemann, Yuri Pradkin and Guillermo Baltra. The Policy Potential of Measuring Internet Outages. Proceedings of the TPRC, the Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy (Washington, DC, USA, Sep. 2018). [PDF] [alt PDF]
Abstract
Today it is possible to evaluate the reliability of the Internet. Prior approaches to measure network reliability required telecommunications providers reporting the status of their own networks, resulting in limits on the precision, timeliness, and availability of the results. Recent work in Internet measurement has shown that network outages can be observed with active measurements from a few sites, and from passive measurements of network telescopes (large, unused address space) or large network services such as content-delivery networks. We suggest that these kinds of *third-party* observations of network outages can provide data that is precise and timely. We discuss early results of Trinocular, an outage detection system using active probing developed at the University of Southern California. Trinocular has been operating continuously since November 2013, and we provide (at no charge) data covering about 4 million network blocks from around the world. This paper describes some results of Trinocular showing outages in a large U.S. Internet Service Provider, and those resulting from the 2017 Hurricane Irma in Florida. Our data shows the impact of the Broadband America policy for always-on networks, and we discuss how it might be used to address future policy questions and assist in disaster planning and recovery.Bibtex Citation
@inproceedings{Heidemann18g,
author = {Heidemann, John and Pradkin, Yuri and Baltra, Guillermo},
title = {The Policy Potential of Measuring {Internet} Outages},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the TPRC, the Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy},
year = {2018},
sortdate = {2018-09-21},
project = {ant, lacanic, divoice},
jsubject = {routing},
month = sep,
address = {Washington, DC, USA},
publisher = pub-tprc,
jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
keywords = {outage, public policy, internet policy},
url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Heidemann18g.html},
pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Heidemann18g.pdf},
myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
copyrightholder = {authors},
otherurl = {https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=754103009004066118108095113016108111121055086045016032125103084098082070089113112076096031059124007061000025001115088126100073024041045040023010000124085113122089119066005079088087087088066119070022093083003115089102107103108090023064069094114067029125&EXT=pdf}
}