Saturday September 1, 02:00 PM
NRI scientist maps the Internet |
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By ANI
Washington, Sept 1 (ANI): An Indian origin researcher in the US has developed a technique for producing annotated, Internet router graphs of different sizes, based on observation of Internet characteristics.
Generated by the new algorithm developed by Priya Mahadevan and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, the Internet map features Internet nodes - shown as red dots, and linkages - shown as green lines.
However, the mostly randomly generated graph retains the essential characteristics of a specific corner of the Internet, but doubles the number of nodes.
Mahadevan said the graph annotations include information about the relevant peer-to-peer business relationships that help to determine the paths that packets of information take as they travel across the Internet.
Generating these kinds of graphs is also critical for a wide range of computer science research, said Mahadevan.
"Defending against denial of service attacks and large-scale worm outbreaks depends on network topology. Our work allows computer scientists to experiment with a range of random graphs that match Internet characteristics," said Mahadevan, the first author on the SIGCOMM 2007 paper.
"This work is also useful for determining the sensitivity of particular techniques - like routing protocols and congestion controls - to network topology and to variations in network topology," she added.
"We're saying, 'here is what the Internet looks like, and here is our recreation of it on a larger scale.' Our algorithm produces random graphs that maintain the important interconnectivity characteristics of the original," said Amin Vahdat, senior author on the paper and a computer science professor at UCSD.
"The goal is to produce a topology generator capable of outputting a range of annotated Internet topologies of varying sizes based on available measurements of network connectivity and characteristics," Prof. Vahdat added.
Prof. Vahdat said the team is now making the source code for their topology generator available publicly, and hope that it will benefit a range of studies.
"The techniques we have developed for characterizing and recreating Internet characteristics are generally applicable to a broad range of disciplines that consider networks, including physics, biology, chemistry, neuroscience and sociology," said Prof. Vahdat. ahadevan presented the findings on August 30 in Kyoto, Japan at ACM SIGCOMM, the premier computer networking conference. (ANI)
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