Internship o↵er spring/summer 2012
Reverse-Engineering the Internet Routing through joint analysis of BGP and IP-level measurements
The Internet is formed by an interconnection of independent networks (Autonomous Systems) and its structure is not publicly available. We have to resort to measurements in order to characterize it. At LIP6, we run a system called TopHat [1] that continuously maps the Internet at the IP level, using over a thousand measurement agents located on PlanetLab nodes around the world. As the paths observed at the IP level are the consequences of the BGP routing policies, BGP information might provide com- plementary information to characterize the Internet routing.
The aim of this internship is to extend the measurement capabilities of the platform with BGP informa- tion, to further analyze the interactions between IP- and BGP-level paths. We are looking for a masters student in computer science or an engineering student who is curious about the design of the Internet, and is eager to bring their skills to bear on improving a major tool for the networking research community.
Supervisor: Timur Friedman (Assistant Professor) Laboratory: LINCS – 23, avenue d’Italie – 75013 Paris Duration: 5-6 months
Description of work
BGP data is available through various sources that perform passive measurements from various van- tage points in the Internet. A first step will be to collect such measurements, thanks to services like BGPMon [2] or by directly querying BGP Looking Glasses [3]. We can extract AS paths from BGP measurements, that will allow us to build the AS graph. It will be interesting to characterize those Looking Glasses to correlate BGP and IP measurements, since they might not be representative of the routing of the whole AS.
A second step is to correlate the IP-level measurements provided by TopHat with these BGP measure- ments. This is a challenging task that still remains an open research issue. For our purposes, we will for instance get support from such tools as the Team Cymru IP/AS mapping service [4].
These two sources of information will be complementary to better understand the Internet routing. In this internship, we will focus on studying BGP events that are correlated with the topology observed by TopHat. For instance, a link failure might cause BGP routing changes that reciprocally will impact many IP paths. Such work is a first step towards a better understanding of the structure of the Internet and its evolution. It might be used as a starting point to further studies such as guiding IP-level measurements triggered by a BGP event; infering BGP routing policies; locating network failures (root cause analysis).
Skills
• Knowledge of IP and routing protocols (mainly BGP).
• Programming skills C/C++, Python, SQL
• Experience with GNU/Linux platforms and network/system development
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• Previous experience with network data analysis is a plus
• Fluency in English
Contact and application
Please provide the following:
• A CV, in PDF format, in either English or French;
• A letter of motivation, in either English or French;
• The names of two references who can be contacted for letters of recommendation.
Timur Friedman <[email protected]>, Marc-Olivier Buob <[email protected]>, Jordan Aug´e<[email protected]>
Laboratoire LIP6-CNRS 4 place Jussieu
75005 Paris, France
Do not hesitate to contact us for more details.
References
[1] Thomas Bourgeau, Jordan Aug´e, Timur Friedman, TopHat: supporting experiments through mea- surement infrastructure federation, Proceedings of TridentCom’2010, 18-20 May 2010, Berlin, Ger- many.
[2] BGPMonhttp://bgpmon.net
[3] BGP looking glasseshttp://www.bgp4.as/looking-glasses
[4] Team Cymru IP to ASN mappinghttp://www.team-cymru.org/Services/ip-to-asn.html
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