Lead Proposal: CNS-0551725 PI: Massey, Daniel F. Institution: Colorado State University
Proposal: CNS-0551661 PI : Meyer, David M. Institution: University of Oregon
Proposal: CNS-0551541 PI : Wang, Lan Institution: University of Memphis
Proposal: CNS-0551736 PI : Zhang, Lixia Institution: University of California-Los Angeles
Researchers at the University of Oregon, Colorado State University, University of Memphis, and University of California at Los Angeles will develop the next generation of the RouteViews system as a community resource to provide the most needed data to networking researchers and educators and network operators. RouteViews provides data on routing in the global Internet and tracks changes at Internet nodes. The project builds upon the existing RouteViews data collection system that was launched in 1998. That system archives routing data from the global Internet and was originally intended as a tool for network operators. Over the last few years, the RouteViews archive has quickly become a major data source for the network research community and numerous recent network routing research projects have benefited from it. These projects range from network topology measurement and routing stability analysis to network diagnosis, anomaly detection, and new routing protocol designs. RouteViews data is also starting to appear in classrooms and has potential for use in both graduate and undergraduate education. This project will address weaknesses in the initial implementation both in the system architecture and the quality of data collected. The investigators will replace the current router software package with an extensible data collector, rebuild the data archive with a new standard format, and provide real-time distribution of the global routing information.
Diagnosing Internet problem can be a daunting task, due to the immense number of networks involved and the distributed nature of the system. Unfortunately, as the Internet becomes more pervasive, faults and attacks on routing have an increasingly large impact on our everyday life. Global routing monitoring projects, such as Oregon RouteViews and RIPE RIS, provide an invaluable data source for understanding Internet problems. However, experience over the years has also shown a number of major limitations in the current BGP data collection process. To overcome these limitations, our collaborators at Colorado State University have developed BGPmon, a lightweight BGP data collector. The primary goal of our work is to make the real-time data from BGPmon easier to use by network operators and researchers so that they do not have to read through massive amounts of data to investigate an outage. Furthermore, we realize the need for finer grained topologies at the router level that can further aid network operators in trouble-shooting and can be used for many research studies. To achieve the above goals, we have developed the NetViews system that gives users the ability to visualize routing data in real-time with an easy-to-use and highly available interface. Moreover, NetViews uses information from BGPmon to act as a trigger to actively probe Internet paths. Thus, we can gather both network-level paths at the control plane and router-level paths at the data plane simultaneously. By visualizing these paths in real time, a network operator can gain a better and quicker understanding of anomalous events. This system can also aid researchers in studies on the correlations between the two planes, e.g., how Internet packet forwarding behaves during routing convergence. NetViews has been demonstated and presented at several conferences, including the National Undergraduate Research Forum, the North American Network Operators Group, and IEEE INFOCOM. Recently, the dual BGP/ traceroute visualization interface prototype was demonstrated at CAIDA’s Workshop on Active Internet Measurements. NetViews 1.0 client has been made available to the public at http://netlab.cs.memphis.edu/netviews1.html.
