Member： Romain FONTUGNE, Malte TASHIRO, Dimitrios GIAKATOS

Category: Exploring

Tags: AS dependency, network delay, link monitoring, disconnection

  1. Background：The Internet is critical, yet we lack a good way to monitor its whole infrastructure.
  2. Purpose：Create an observatory for monitoring Internet’s topology and open to everyone.
  3. Approach：
    • More data: conduct new measurements and provide new datasets to the community.
    • Better analysis: leverage our routing and data analysis expertise for advanced Internet data analysis.

IHR Overview

Understanding and monitoring Internet topology is crucial to troubleshoot connectivity issues, improve resiliency, and understand the evolution of the Internet. There are measurement platforms (e.g RIPE Atlas) that can help in these regards, but they mostly provide raw data that need to be processed to get real insights, and this is not an easy task because the volume and velocity of these datasets are quite daunting. The Internet Health Report (IHR) aims to fill this gap by providing an analytics platform for Internet infrastructure data. At its core, IHR ingests mainly BGP and traceroute data and computes network metrics such as AS Hegemony and RTTs. These actionable insights are then presented in the form of interactive reports on the IHR website and public datasets that can be reused for informed decisions and research.

IHR projects

AS Hegemony

Networks connected to the Internet rely on other networks (a.k.a ASes) to transmit data. Consequently, the connectivity of a network depends on the connectivity of other networks. AS Hegemony is a metric to evaluate these interdependencies based on BGP data. See our research report for more details: Romain Fontugne, Anant Shah, Emile Aben, The (thin) Bridges of AS Connectivity: Measuring Dependency using AS Hegemony, PAM 2018.

Latency monitoring

Using RIPE Atlas traceroutes we monitor the network latency between multiple places in the networks and report abrupt changes in latency. This allows us to identify disruptive events such as submarine cable cuts, DoS attacks, and routing mishaps. One of the employed technique is describe in: The techniques we used are detailed in the following research paper: R. Fontugne, E. Aben, C. Pelsser, R. Bush, Pinpointing Delay and Forwarding Anomalies Using Large-Scale Traceroute Measurements. ACM IMC 2017, London, UK.

Outage Detection

To detect significant network disconnections we monitor the status of Atlas probes. We essentially seek synchronized disconnections of probes that are in the same geographical or topological area. See our research report for more details: A. Shah, R. Fontugne, E. Aben, C. Pelsser, R. Bush, Disco: Fast, Good, and Cheap Outage Detection. TMA 2017

IHR website - https://ihr.iijlab.net

The IHR website provides outputs from IHR research projects in a simple and friendly web interface. This is also an open source initiative, see the github repository.

Internet Yellow Pages

The Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) is a knowledge database that gathers information about Internet resources (for example ASNs, IP prefixes, and domain names). It includes data from 20+ different organizations which account for over 10M datapoints and about 70M relationships between the datapoints. The goal of IYP is to provide a unified database that researchers can use to discover new insights about the Internet and help other stakeholders to gain a better understanding of the Internet topology.

IYP is quickly growing with the constant addition of Internet related datasets, please see recent updates in the github repository and at the IYP website.

Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained widespread popularity globally as powerful tools for streamlining language-related tasks, such as text classification, content generation, toxicity classification, and code generation. The Internet Health Report explores the application of LLMs in generating Cypher queries from English texts, aiming to simplify querying in the Internet Yellow Pages. By leveraging LLMs, policymakers and regulators can more effectively utilize IYP data to make informed decisions.

Blogs

Presentations

Selected Publications

PAGE TOP