Internet Mapping Project

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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.

Contents

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]

Techniques

The techniques 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 (TTL) 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. [5]

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. [6]

Other internet mapping projects

See also

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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. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-02-06. Retrieved 2007-11-30.
  3. ↑ "Home - Lumeta". Archived from the original on 3 February 2014. Retrieved 30 August 2016.
  4. ↑ Cheswick, William. "The Internet Mapping project"
  5. ↑ "Mapping the Internet"
  6. ↑ I.B.M. T.J. Watson Research Active Probing
  7. ↑ David Newbury [@workergnome] (December 10, 2016). "Going through old papers my dad gave me, I found his map of the internet as of May 1973. The entire internet" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  8. ↑ "IPv4 and IPv6 AS Core: Visualizing IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Topology at a Macroscopic Scale". CAIDA. 26 February 2008. Retrieved 2021-11-12.
  9. ↑ "UNH-EOS Individual News". Archived from the original on 18 February 2014. Retrieved 30 August 2016.
  10. ↑ Popova, Maria. "Ordering the Chaos: The Internet Mapping Project"
  11. ↑ Kelly, Kevin. "The Internet Mapping Project"
  12. ↑ Kelly, Kevin (2009-02-09), internetmap012 , retrieved 2024-04-25
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