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.

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.