DIMES (Distributed Internet Measurements & Simulations) [1] was a subproject of the EVERGROW Integrated Project in the EU Information Society Technologies, Future and Emerging Technologies programme. It studied the structure and topology of the Internet to obtain map and annotate it with delay, loss and link capacity.
DIMES used measurements by software agents downloaded by volunteers and installed on their privately owned machines. Once installed at the agent operates at a very low rate so as to have minimal impact on the machine performance and on its network connection. DIMES intended to explore relationships between the data gathered on the Internet's growth with geographical and socio-economic data, in particular for fast developing countries, to see if they can provide a measure of economic development and societal openness. The project published period maps at several aggregation levels on the web.
As of April 2007 [update] , over 12500 agents were installed by over 5500 users residing in about 95 nations, and in several hundreds of ASes. The project collected over 2.2 billion measurements.
A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data, combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system to also include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations.
Network topology is the arrangement of the elements of a communication network. Network topology can be used to define or describe the arrangement of various types of telecommunication networks, including command and control radio networks, industrial fieldbusses and computer networks.
Wireless community networks (WCNs) or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, NGO's and cooperatives in order to provide a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers.
Network mapping is the study of the physical connectivity of networks e.g. the Internet. Network mapping discovers the devices on the network and their connectivity. It is not to be confused with network discovery or network enumerating which discovers devices on the network and their characteristics such as. The field of automated network mapping has taken on greater importance as networks become more dynamic and complex in nature.
A very-small-aperture terminal (VSAT) is a two-way satellite ground station with a dish antenna that is smaller than 3.8 meters. The majority of VSAT antennas range from 75 cm to 1.2 m. Bit rates, in most cases, range from 4 kbit/s up to 16 Mbit/s. VSATs access satellites in geosynchronous orbit or geostationary orbit to relay data from small remote Earth stations (terminals) to other terminals or master Earth station "hubs".
Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet service providers (ISPs) delivering connectivity at a wide range of data transfer rates via various networking technologies. Many organizations, including a growing number of municipal entities, also provide cost-free wireless access and landlines.
A mesh network is a local area network topology in which the infrastructure nodes connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible and cooperate with one another to efficiently route data to and from clients.
The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is a multi-disciplinary department of social and computer science dedicated to the study of information, communication, and technology, and is part of the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford, England.
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies, based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies.
In the fields of information technology and systems management, application performance management (APM) is the monitoring and management of the performance and availability of software applications. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service. APM is "the translation of IT metrics into business meaning ."
EtherCAT is an Ethernet-based fieldbus system invented by Beckhoff Automation. The protocol is standardized in IEC 61158 and is suitable for both hard and soft real-time computing requirements in automation technology.
Web mapping or an online mapping is the process of using maps, usually created through geographic information systems (GIS), on the Internet, more specifically in the World Wide Web (WWW). A web map or an online map is both served and consumed, thus web mapping is more than just web cartography, it is a service by which consumers may choose what the map will show. Web GIS emphasizes geodata processing aspects more involved with design aspects such as data acquisition and server software architecture such as data storage and algorithms, than it does the end-user reports themselves.
Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, using the GPS, GLONASS, Galileo or BeiDou system, are used in many applications. The first systems were developed in the 20th century, mainly to help military personnel find their way, but location awareness soon found many civilian applications.
The Internet Mapping Project 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.
Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) is a "map-and-encapsulate" protocol which is developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force LISP Working Group. The basic idea behind the separation is that the Internet architecture combines two functions, routing locators and identifiers in one number space: the IP address. LISP supports the separation of the IPv4 and IPv6 address space following a network-based map-and-encapsulate scheme. In LISP, both identifiers and locators can be IP addresses or arbitrary elements like a set of GPS coordinates or a MAC address.
The Digital Humanitarian Network is a consortium allowing Volunteer and Technical Communities (V&TCs) to interface with humanitarian organizations that seek their services.
RIPE Atlas is a global, open, distributed Internet measurement platform, consisting of thousands of measurement devices that measure Internet connectivity in real time.
Land change models (LCMs) describe, project, and explain changes in and the dynamics of land use and land-cover. LCMs are a means of understanding ways that humans change the Earth's surface in the past, present, and future.
The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) is a project that monitors internet censorship globally. It relies on volunteers to run software that detects blocking and reports the findings to the organization. As of October 2019, OONI has analyzed 292 million network connections in 233 countries.
Kimberly C. "KC" Claffy is director of the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the University of California, San Diego. In 2017 she was awarded the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award and inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2019.