Executive Summary
CAIDA proposes 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.
We propose an 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 eachother.
Related Material:
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)