Integrated Library for Advancing Network Data Science-(ILANDS) 1 Rationale and Need for Infrastructure

Understanding the Internet’s changing character is impossible without realistic and representative datasets and measurement infrastructure that can support sustained longitudinal measurements as well as new experiments, and with resulting data available to scientific researchers. But there is a dearth of good data to support research, for several good reasons: complexity, scale, and cost of measurement instrumentation; information-hiding properties of the routing system; privacy, security and commercial sensitivities; costs of storing and processing the data; and lack of incentives to gather data in the first place, including cost-effective ways to use it operationally [1]. This opacity of the Internet infrastructure hinders research and development efforts to model network behavior and topology, and design protocols and new architectures. More fundamentally, it also hinders our ability to understand and reason about real-world properties of the Internet such as robustness, resilience, security, and stability. We propose to upgrade and integrate two of our measurement capabilities to enable a community of researchers across many institutions to collaborate on a high-level focused agenda: understanding the evolving character of the Internet, with the objective of assessing, modeling and shaping its security and resilience. This infrastructure will also enable CAIDA and RouteViews to continue their 20+ year record of providing high-quality measurement data to enrich the scientific network research endeavors of a diverse community of investigators. Our first measurement capability is traffic capture. For decades it has been virtually impossible for researchers to get access to passive (sniffed) traffic data from Internet backbone links due to privacy concerns. Based on trust relationships that have been maintained for over two decades, CAIDA has been able to measure strategic links in the backbone so long is it could provide funding for the monitor. We had to stop these data sets in January 2019 when the link upgrade to 100GB rendered collection technology obsolete. The second measurement capability relates to the structure and dynamics of the network topology. The RouteViews project has been sharing Internet routing data with the research community for more than twenty years – while the Internet routing table has increased an order of magnitude in size. We propose to enhance infrastructure to sustain the increased packet rates and routing table growth, expand storage and compute resources to support long-term use of the data, and develop additional tools to facilitate their combined use. While these two data sources have existed separately in the past, current privacy-protection approaches have prohibited joint analysis across them. A concomitant goal of the proposed effort is to investigate approaches to protect privacy that will permit integration of the gathered data, a new capability that is critical to some of the identified research goals. Few research teams would be able to field this infrastructure much less support sharing this data. A collaborative team at CAIDA and NSRC will develop user services and engagement needed to grow a robust research community that is actively involved in determining directions for the infrastructure, and optimizing NSF’s investment toward achievement of these goals. Our outreach coordination process will have five objectives: (1) shape what data we collect and store, its formats, access model, long-term archival, and overall management of the infrastructure; (2) find new users of the infrastructure, especially from underrepresented groups, and assist them with sound use of the data; and (3) bring this community together to facilitate collaboration on a focused research area that would not otherwise be possible (Section 2); (4) publish methodologies of data analysis and resulting insights; (5) establish a concrete plan for sustainability of the infrastructure to support the needs of the U.S. science and engineering research community.