This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Much of the Internet's growth occurs in domains beyond the reach of current measurement techniques and platforms, such as behind NAT boxes and firewalls or in regions of the Internet not exposed by public BGP feeds. This work is motivated by the observation that, collectively, peers in large-scale P2P systems have a unique and valuable perspective on network conditions, one to which today's researchers, operators and users have limited or no access. P2P systems are an ideal vehicle for accessing these views, being among the largest services and covering most of the Internet. As passive monitors of the Internet, different P2P systems can provide different, complementary views of the network, over partially overlapping space and time domains. The goal of this effort is to explore the potential for reusing such valuable view, investigating techniques for gathering, sharing, and exploiting it. The work focuses on: identifying useful metrics regarding network conditions collected by these peers and evaluating their potential for reuse (over time and across multiple systems' perspectives), designing approaches for maintaining this information and making it accessible to other large-scale distributed systems in a decentralized manner while preserving the privacy of the participating peers, and exploring potential applications that could benefit from this information.
Access to end-host views of the network will help in the understanding and characterization of the underlying network and address the needs of new emergent Internet services and applications.
