The impact of an outage, congestion, hijacking, and many other Internet phenomena depends on how many users or how much traffic use the route, but researchers lack visibility into how important routes are, and, distressingly, seem to have lost hope of obtaining this information without proprietary datasets or privileged viewpoints. We believe that there is hope – new measurement methods and changes in Internet structure make it possible to construct an “Internet Traffic Map” identifying the locations (logical and perhaps geographical) of Internet users and major services, the paths between users and major services, and the relative activity levels (traffic, queries, or number of users) routed along these paths. We will construct this map. The realization of an Internet Traffic Map will be an Internet-scale effort that will have Internet-scale consequences that reach far beyond the research community.

This project is eligible for a matching fund stipend from the Data Science Institute. This is not a guarantee of payment, and the total amount is subject to available funding.

Faculty Advisor

  • Professor: Ethan Katz-Bassett
  • Center/Lab: Systems and Networks Lab
  • We design systems to improve the reliability and performance of Internet services. To understand the problems, we look to the needs of operators/providers and conduct measurements, and then we design deployable systems to improve the Internet and services that run over it.

Project Timeline

  • Earliest starting date: 9/28/21
  • End date:
  • Number of hours per week of research expected during Fall 2021: ~10
  • Number of hours per week of research expected during Summer 2022: ~20

Candidate requirements

  • Skill sets: Experience with Java or Python
  • Student eligibility: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, master’s
  • International students on F1 or J1 visa: eligible
  • Academic Credit Possible: Yes