Reverse engineering the Internet

Abstract

To provide insight into Internet operation and performance, recent efforts have measured various aspects of the Internet, developing and improving measurement tools in the process. In this paper, we argue that these independent advances present the community with a startling opportunity: the collaborative reverse-engineering of the Internet. By this, we mean annotating a map of the Internet with properties such as: client populations, features and workloads; network ownership, capacity, connectivity, geography and routing policies; patterns of loss, congestion, failure and growth; and so forth. This combination of properties it greater than the sum of its parts, and exposes the attributes of network design easily overlooked by simpler, uncorrelated models. We argue that reverse engineering the Internet is feasible based on continuing improvements in measurement techniques, the potential to infer new properties from external measurements, and an accounting of the resources required to complete the process.