The Internet is an essential part of modern society, playing a vital role in a wide range of educational, commercial, military, and social activities. However, network operators today have a limited ability to observe and control the paths used to carry traffic across the Internet. For example, although it is often beneficial for several networks to cooperate?e.g., a content provider and cellular network jointly picking the best paths from content to customers?existing Internet routing protocols make it difficult to share information or collaborate to select routes. These limitations contribute to a host of problems, including decreased path stability, degraded performance, and service outages.
This project will develop a system called IN-CONTROL that aggregates information from participating networks and active measurements into an inter-domain network information base (iNIB). The iNIB presents operators with a unified interface for making observations about global forwarding paths and a rich control interface for issuing requests to steer traffic along preferred paths. To build the iNIB, the project is focusing on the following tasks: (i) developing provenance-based techniques to obtain reliable results from computations performed over potentially-untrustworthy data (ii) designing deployable mechanisms for observing and controlling Internet forwarding paths, and (iii) building a scalable implementation that incorporates optimizations to reduce resource demands for answering iNIB queries. The intellectual merit of this research lies in developing reliable abstractions for observing and controlling Internet forwarding paths and a scalable implementation that can be readily deployed on the current Internet.
The broader impacts include reducing the fragility of the Internet, and broadening the interdisciplinary community of researchers working on problems related to inter-domain networking. This project also provides research experiences for undergraduate students and members of under-represented groups.
