Towards a traffic map of the Internet

Abstract

The impact of Internet phenomena depends on how they impact users, but researchers lack visibility into how to translate Internet events into their impact. Distressingly, the research community seems to have lost hope of obtaining this information without relying on privileged viewpoints. We argue for optimism thanks to new network measurement methods and changes in Internet structure which make it possible to construct an "Internet traffic map". This map would identify the locations of users and major services, the paths between them, and the relative activity levels routed along these paths. We sketch our vision for the map, detail new measurement ideas for map construction, and identify key challenges that the research community should tackle. The realization of an Internet traffic ma p wi ll be an In ternet-scale research effort with Internet-scale impacts that reach far beyond the research community, and so we hope our fellow researchers are excited to join us in addressing this challenge.

BGP-Multipath Routing in the Internet

“…Our work is also valuable to Internet researchers, who can use our measurement data to obtain a fuller and more detailed picture of the inter-domain routing between ASes. This can help the study on inter-domain congestion [64] and the study on Internet traffic map [65].…”