Internet Mapping Project

Internet Map

The Internet Mapping Project[1][2] was started by William Cheswick and Hal Burch at Bell Labs in 1997. It has collected and preserved traceroute-style paths to some hundreds of thousands of networks almost daily since 1998. The project included visualization of the Internet data, and the Internet maps were widely disseminated.

The technology is now used by Lumeta, a spinoff of Bell Labs, to map corporate and government networks. Although Cheswick left Lumeta in September 2006, Lumeta continues to map both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet. The data allows for both a snapshot and view over time of the routed infrastructure of a particular geographical area, company, organization, etc.[3] Cheswick continues to collect and preserve the data, and it is available for research purposes. According to Cheswick, a main goal of the project was to collect the data over time, and make a time-lapse movie of the growth of the Internet.[4]

Today, Lumeta and many organizations such as CAIDA(The Cooperatave Association for Internet Data Analysis) continue internet mapping, which is the study of the physical connectivity of the Internet. They collect, monitor, analyze, and visualize several forms of Internet traffic data concerning network topology. This data is used for a variety of applications in business and society.[5]

Techniques

Currently, all the techniques now available for network discovery rely on hop-limited probes of the type used by the Unix traceroute utility or the Windows NT tracert.exe tool. A Traceroute-style network probe follows the path that network packets take from a source node to a destination node. This technique uses Internet Protocol packets with an 8-bit Time to Live header field. As a packet passes through routers on the Internet, each router decreases the TTL value by one until it reaches zero. When a router receives a packet with a TTL value of zero, it drops the packet instead of forwarding it. At this point, it sends an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) error message to the source node where the packet originated indicating that the packet exceeded its maximum transit time. [6]

Active Probing – Active probing is a series of probes set out through a network to obtain data. Active probing is used in internet mapping to discover the topology of the Internet. Topology maps of the Internet are an important tool for characterizing the infrastructure and understanding the properties, behavior and evolution of the Internet.[7]

Specific uses of internet mapping

Lumeta has enabled companies to map IPv4 and IPv6 Internet user’s data and networks through its software. There are many companies that have partnered with Lumeta in order to integrate internet mapping into their business applications:[8]

Other internet mapping projects

See also

References

  1. Cheswick, W.; Burch, H. (April 1999). "Mapping the Internet". IEEE Computer. 32 (4).
  2. Cheswick, Bill; Burch, Hal; Branigan, Steve (2000). "Mapping and Visualizing the Internet" (PDF). Proceedings of the Usenix Annual Technical Conference, 2000.
  3. "Home - Lumeta". Retrieved 30 August 2016.
  4. Cheswick, William. "The Internet Mapping project"
  5. CAIDA "Topology Research"
  6. "Mapping the Internet"
  7. I.B.M. T.J. Watson Research Active Probing
  8. "Technology Partners & Integrations - Lumeta". Retrieved 30 August 2016.
  9. "Home - Infoblox". Retrieved 30 August 2016.
  10. "UNH-EOS Individual News". Retrieved 30 August 2016.
  11. Popova, Maria. "Ordering the Chaos: The Internet Mapping Project"
  12. Kelly, Kevin. "The Internet Mapping Project"

External links

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