Tag: Internet Measurement Conference

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Mapping the Expansion of Google’s Serving Infrastructure” in IMC 2013 and WSJ Blog

The paper “Mapping the Expansion of Google’s Serving Infrastructure” (by Matt Calder, Xun Fan, Zi Hu, Ethan Katz-Bassett, John Heidemann and Ramesh Govindan) will appear in the 2013 ACM Internet Measurements Conference (IMC) in Barcelona, Spain in Oct. 2013.

This work was also featured today in Digits, the technology news and analysis blog from the Wall Street Journal, and at USC’s press room.

A copy of the paper is available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Calder13a, and data from the work is available at http://mappinggoogle.cs.usc.edu, from http://www.isi.edu/ant/traces/mapping_google/index.html, and from http://www.predict.org.

[Calder13a] figure 5a
Growth of Google’s infrastructure, measured in IP addresses [Calder13a] figure 5a

From the paper’s abstract:

Modern content-distribution networks both provide bulk content and act as “serving infrastructure” for web services in order to reduce user-perceived latency. Serving infrastructures such as Google’s are now critical to the online economy, making it imperative to understand their size, geographic distribution, and growth strategies. To this end, we develop techniques that enumerate IP addresses of servers in these infrastructures, find their geographic location, and identify the association between clients and clusters of servers. While general techniques for server enumeration and geolocation can exhibit large error, our techniques exploit the design and mechanisms of serving infrastructure to improve accuracy. We use the EDNS-client-subnet DNS extension to measure which clients a service maps to which of its serving sites. We devise a novel technique that uses this mapping to geolocate servers by combining noisy information about client locations with speed-of-light constraints. We demonstrate that this technique substantially improves geolocation accuracy relative to existing approaches. We also cluster server IP addresses into physical sites by measuring RTTs and adapting the cluster thresholds dynamically. Google’s serving infrastructure has grown dramatically in the ten months, and we use our methods to chart its growth and understand its content serving strategy. We find that the number of Google serving sites has increased more than sevenfold, and most of the growth has occurred by placing servers in large and small ISPs across the world, not by expanding Google’s backbone.

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Software releases

Software to Generate IP Hitlists with Hadoop Now Available

We are happy to release the set of map/reduce processing scripts that run in Hadoop to consume our Internet address censuses and output hitlists, as described in the paper “Selecting Representative IP Addresses for Internet Topology Studies“.

These scripts depend on our internal Hadoop configuration and so will require some modification to work elsewhere, but we make them available and encourage feedback about their use.

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Announcements Data

Complete IPv4 geolocation dataset now available

complete_geoloc_map

We recently finished the work of geolocating all IPv4 addresses and plotted a “complete IP geolocation map“.

This work is based on our previous IMC paper “Towards Geolocation of Millions of IP Addresses“, joint work of Zi Hu, John Heidemann, and Yuri Pradkin.

Processed data from this work is visible on our browsable web map.  The raw data from this effort is available through PREDICT or from the authors.

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Papers Publications

New conference paper “Towards Geolocation of Millions of IP Addresses” at IMC 2012

The paper “Towards Geolocation of Millions of IP Addresses” was accepted by IMC 2012 in Boston, MA (available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Hu12a.html).

From the abstract:

Previous measurement-based IP geolocation algorithms have focused on accuracy, studying a few targets with increasingly sophisticated algorithms taking measurements from tens of vantage points (VPs). In this paper, we study how to scale up existing measurement-based geolocation algorithms like Shortest Ping and CBG to cover the whole Internet. We show that with many vantage points, VP proximity to the target is the most important factor affecting accuracy. This observation suggests our new algorithm that selects the best few VPs for each target from many candidates. This approach addresses the main bottleneck to geolocation scalability: minimizing traffic into each target (and also out of each VP) while maintaining accuracy. Using this approach we have currently geolocated about 35% of the allocated, unicast, IPv4 address-space (about 85% of the addresses in the Internet that can be directly geolocated). We visualize our geolocation results on a web-based address-space browser.

Citation: Zi Hu and John Heidemann and Yuri Pradkin. Towards Geolocation of Millions of IP Addresses. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, p. to appear. Boston, MA, USA, ACM. 2012. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Hu12a.html>

 

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Papers Publications

New conference paper “Selecting Representative IP Addresses for Internet Topology Studies” to appear at IMC

The paper “Selecting Representative IP Addresses for Internet Topology Studies” (available at http://www.isi.edu/~xunfan/research/Fan10a.pdf) was accepted to appear at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2010 in Melbourne, Australia.

From the abstract:

An Internet hitlist is a set of addresses that cover and can represent the the Internet as a whole. Hitlists have long been used in studies of Internet topology, reachability, and performance, serving as the destinations of traceroute or performance probes. Most early topology studies used manually generated lists of prominent addresses, but evolution and growth of the Internet make human maintenance untenable. Random selection scales to today’s address space, but most andom addresses fail to respond. In this paper we present what we believe is the first automatic generation of hitlists informed censuses of Internet addresses. We formalize the desirable characteristics of a hitlist: reachability, each representative responds to pings; completeness, they cover all the allocated IPv4 address space; and stability, list evolution is minimized when possible. We quantify the accuracy of our automatic hitlists, showing that only one-third of the Internet allows informed selection of representatives. Of informed representatives, 50–60% are likely to respond three months later, and we show that causes for non-responses are likely due to dynamic addressing (so no stable representative exists) or firewalls. In spite of these limitations, we show that the use of informed hitlists can add 1.7 million edge links (a 5% growth) to traceroute-based Internet topology studies. Our hitlists are available free-of-charge and are in use by several other research projects.

Citation: Xun Fan and John Heidemann. Selecting Representative IP Addresses for Internet Topology Studies. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC). Melbourne, Australia, ACM. November, 2010. http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Fan10a.html

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Towards an AS-to-Organization Map” to appear at IMC

The paper “Towards an AS-to-Organization Map” was accepted by IMC’10 in Melbourne, Australia (available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Cai10c.html).

From the abstract:

An understanding of Internet topology is central to answer various questions ranging from network resilience to peer selection or data center location. While much of prior work has examined AS-level connectivity, meaningful and relevant results from such an abstract view of Internet topology have been limited. For one, semantically, AS relationships capture business relationships and not physical connectivity. Additionally, many organizations often use multiple ASes, either to implement different routing policies, or as legacies from mergers and acquisitions. In this paper, we move beyond the traditional AS graph view of the Internet to define the problem of AS-to-organization mapping. We describe our initial steps at automating the capture of the rich semantics inherent in the AS-level ecosystem where routing and connectivity intersect with organizations. We discuss preliminary methods that identify multi-AS organizations from WHOIS data and illustrate the challenges posed by the quality of the available data and the complexity of real-world organizational relationships.

Citation: Xue Cai, John Heidemann, Balachander Krishnamurthy, and Walter Willinger. Towards an AS-to-Organization Map. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, p. to appear. Melbourne, Australia, ACM. November, 2010.

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Papers Publications

new conference paper “On the Characteristics and Reasons of Long-lived Internet Flows” at IMC

The paper “On the Characteristics and Reasons of Long-lived Internet Flows” was accepted by IMC’10 in Melbourne, Australia (available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Quan10a.html).

From the abstract:

Prior studies of Internet traffic have considered traffic at different resolutions and time scales: packets and flows for hours or days, aggregate packet statistics for days or weeks, and hourly trends for months. However, little is known about the long-term behavior of individual flows. In this paper, we study individual flows (as defined by the 5-tuple of protocol, source and destination IP address and port) over days and weeks. While the vast majority of flows are short, and most bytes are in short flows, we find that about 20% of the overall bytes are carried in flows that last longer than 10 minutes, and flows lasting 100 minutes or longer make up 2% of traffic. We show that long-lived flows are qualitatively different from short flows: they are generally slower, less bursty, and are due to different applications and protocols. We investigate the causes of short- and long-lived flows, and show that the traffic mix varies significantly depending on duration time scale, with computer-to-computer traffic more and more dominating in larger time scales.

Citation: Lin Quan and John Heidemann. On the Characteristics and Reasons of Long-lived Internet Flows. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference. Melbourne, Australia, ACM. November, 2010. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Quan10a.html>.


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Papers Publications

new conference paper “Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet” at SIGCOMM

The paper “Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet” was accepted and presented at SIGCOMM’10 in New Delhi, India (available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Cai10a.html).

From the abstract:

Although the Internet is widely used today, we have little information about the edge of the network. Decentralized management, firewalls, and sensitivity to probing prevent easy answers and make measurement difficult. Building on frequent ICMP probing of 1% of the Internet address space, we develop clustering and analysis methods to estimate how Internet addresses are used. We show that adjacent addresses often have similar characteristics and are used for similar purposes (61% of addresses we probe are consistent blocks of 64 neighbors or more). We then apply this block-level clustering to provide data to explore several open questions in how networks are managed. First, we provide information about how effectively network address blocks appear to be used, finding that a significant number of blocks are only lightly used (most addresses in about one-fifth of /24 blocks are in use less than 10% of the time), an important issue as the IPv4 address space nears full allocation. Second, we provide new measurements about dynamically managed address space, showing nearly 40% of /24 blocks appear to be dynamically allocated, and dynamic addressing is most widely used in countries more recent to the Internet (more than 80% in China, while less than 30% in the U.S.). Third, we distinguish blocks with low-bitrate last-hops and show that such blocks are often underutilized.

Citation: Xue Cai and John Heidemann. Understanding Block-level Address Usage in the Visible Internet. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference , p. to appear. New Delhi, India, ACM. August, 2010. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Cai10a.html>.

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Papers Publications

IMC paper on Internet Census described in MIT Tech Review

The IMC paper “Census and Survey of the Visible Internet” was described in an article “Probe Sees Unused Internet” in the MIT Technology Review by Robert Lemos.

The article provides a nice summary of the issues, but it reaches a conclusion that is stronger supported by the study.  The subhead of the article is “A survey shows that addresses are not running out as quickly as we’d thought”, and the article draws the conclusion: “the problem [of IPv4 address exhaustion] may not be as bad as many fear.”

The article’s conclusion, I think, overly simplifies matters—it is only true if the “better things we should be doing in managing the IPv4 address space” are free. The Internet Census we carried out supports the opportunity for better IPv4 address space management.  But an open question is the cost of such management.  Historically, with plentiful IPv4 addresses, IPv4 management costs have been small, but potential better IPv4 management will likely be much more costly.  This cost of ongoing IPv4 management needs to be weighed against the costs of one-time conversion cost to IPv6 coupled followed lower IPv6 management costs.

To me, one exciting conclusion from the Internet Census we carried out is that we now have data that allows us to start evaluating these trade-offs.  The answer may be more careful IPv4 gets us a few years, or that the cost of more careful IPv4 makes IPv6 an obvious choice.  In either case, resolving this transition is important for the Internet community.

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Papers Publications

new paper about Internet address space census and survey

We are happy to report that the paper “Census and Survey of the Visible Internet” has been accepted to appear at the Internet Measurement Conference in Vouliagmeni, Greece in October 2008.

A preprint is available at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann08c.html, and an extended version is available as an updated technical report at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann08a.html.

Citation: John Heidemann, Yuri Pradkin, Ramesh Govindan, Christos Papadopoulos, Genevieve Bartlett, and Joseph Bannister. Census and Survey of the Visible Internet. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 169-182. Vouliagmeni, Greece, ACM. October, 2008. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1452520.1452542