Workshop Proposal

CAIDA proposes to host a workshop to discuss a collaboration to simultaneously solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet: a self-reported financial crisis in the Internet infrastructure provider industry; a data acquisition crisis which has severely stunted the field of network science; and a struggle for survival within emerging community and municipal networks, who are in an ideal position to address the first two problems but often lack resources and experience to make informed operational decisions, and are also continually threatened by incumbent-driven legislation.

The workshop will be a focused discussion on the viability and requirements of a single proposed experiment: to build a cooperative national backbone to connect select community and municipal networks to each other, and to the global Internet. Peering would be conditionally available to county, state, and federal government entities, academic institutions, and community wireless initiatives. The conditions are two-fold: (1) the attached networks must make select operational data available to Internet technology and policy researchers under appropriate legal data sharing frameworks; (2) the attached networks must agree to cooperatively develop and abide by policies based on confirmed results of empirical data analyses.

The proposed experiment -- Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (COMMONS) -- carefully addresses the three highlighted problems, and without federal regulatory involvement, which is still feared to be a cure worse than the disease(s) even by the regulators themselves. First, by offloading from commercial providers the responsibility for supporting Internet service delivery in unprofitable areas, we will measurably improve the financial situation of these providers. Second, COMMONS offers an unprecedented opportunity to establish standards of scientific integrity in the field of Internet research -- by providing rigorous empirical data against which to validate theories, models and simulations. Furthermore, because the COMMONS testbed will support public analysis of actual Internet traffic, it will inform debates on increasingly important technical, economic, policy, and social issues related to the Internet. Third, the COMMONS project not only allows struggling community networks to cost-share a financially daunting component of their operation, but it also provides a forum for the cooperating networks and the research community to share lessons learned with each other.

Workshop Budget

  30 air travelers x $500 airfare  $15,000
  20 rooms         x $225           $4,500
  40 participants  UCSD catering    $4,500 based on recent workshop of ~39 attendees
                   UCSD IDC         $2,453
                                   $26,453

Indirect Costs (IDC)

UCSD indirect cost rate is 54.5% on modified total direct costs (MTDC). MTDC excludes tuition remission, participant support, equipment and the excess of $25,000 on subcontracts.