An official website of the United States government
We use traceroute and BGP data from globally distributed Internet measurement infrastructures to study the impact of a noteworthy submarine cable launch connecting Africa to South America. We leverage archived data from RIPE Atlas and CAIDA Ark platforms, as well as custom measurements from strategic vantage points, to quantify the differences in end-to-end latency and path lengths before and after deployment of this new South-Atlantic cable. We find that ASes operating in South America significantly benefit from this new cable, with reduced latency to all measured African countries. More surprising is that end-to-end latency to/from some regions of the world, including intra-African paths towards Angola, increased after switching to the cable. We track these unintended consequences to suboptimally circuitous IP paths that traveled from Africa to Europe, possibly North America, and South America before traveling back to Africa over the cable. Although some suboptimalities are expected given the lack of peering among neighboring ASes in the developing world, we found two other causes: (i) problematic intra-domain routing within a single Angolese network, and (ii) suboptimal routing/traffic engineering by its BGP neighbors. After notifying the operating AS of our results, we found that most of these suboptimalities were subsequently resolved. We designed our method to generalize to the study of other cable deployments or outages and share our code to promote reproducibility and extension of our work.
more »
« less
Reassessing the Constancy of End-to-End Internet Latency
A paper by Zhang et al. in 2001, “On the Constancy of Internet Path Properties” [1] examined the constancy of end- to-end packet loss, latency, and throughput using a modest set of hosts deployed in the Internet. In the time since that work, the Internet has changed dramatically, including the flattening of the autonomous system hierarchy and increased deployment of IPv6, among other developments. In this paper, we investigate the constancy of end-to-end Internet latency, revisiting findings of the earlier study. We use latency measurements from RIPE Atlas, choosing a set of 124 anchors with broad geographic distribution and drawn from 112 distinct autonomous systems. The earlier work of Zhang et al. relies on changepoint detection methods to identify mathematically constant time periods. We reimplement the two methods described in that earlier work and use them on the RIPE Atlas latency measurements. We also use a recently- published method (HMM-HDP) that has direct support in a RIPE Atlas API. Comparing the three changepoint detection methods, we find that the two methods used in the earlier work may miss many changepoints caused by common level-shift events. Overall, we find that the recently proposed HMM-HDP method performs substantially better. Moreover, we find that delay spikes—as defined by the earlier work—are an order of magnitude less prevalent than 20 years ago. We also find that maximum change- free regions (CFRs) along paths that we observe in today’s Internet are substantially longer than what was observed in 2001, regardless of the changepoint detection method used. In particular, the 50th percentile maximum CFR was on the order of 30 minutes in the earlier study, but our analysis reveals it to be on the order of 3 days or longer. Moreover, we find that CFR durations appear to have steadily increased over the past 5 years.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1814537
- PAR ID:
- 10386604
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IFIP Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
DNS latency is a concern for many service operators: CDNs exist to reduce service latency to end-users but must rely on global DNS for reachability and load-balancing. Today, DNS latency is monitored by active probing from distributed platforms like RIPE Atlas, with Verfploeter, or with commercial services. While Atlas coverage is wide, its 10k sites see only a fraction of the Internet. In this paper we show that passive observation of TCP handshakes can measure \emph{live DNS latency, continuously, providing good coverage of current clients of the service}. Estimating RTT from TCP is an old idea, but its application to DNS has not previously been studied carefully. We show that there is sufficient TCP DNS traffic today to provide good operational coverage (particularly of IPv6), and very good temporal coverage (better than existing approaches), enabling near-real time evaluation of DNS latency from \emph{real clients}. We also show that DNS servers can optionally solicit TCP to broaden coverage. We quantify coverage and show that estimates of DNS latency from TCP is consistent with UDP latency. Our approach finds previously unknown, real problems: \emph{DNS polarization} is a new problem where a hypergiant sends global traffic to one anycast site rather than taking advantage of the global anycast deployment. Correcting polarization in Google DNS cut its latency from 100ms to 10ms; and from Microsoft Azure cut latency from 90ms to 20ms. We also show other instances of routing problems that add 100--200ms latency. Finally, \emph{real-time} use of our approach for a European country-level domain has helped detect and correct a BGP routing misconfiguration that detoured European traffic to Australia. We have integrated our approach into several open source tools: Entrada, our open source data warehouse for DNS, a monitoring tool (ANTS), which has been operational for the last 2 years on a country-level top-level domain, and a DNS anonymization tool in use at a root server since March 2021.more » « less
-
Cloud providers are highly incentivized to reduce latency. One way they do this is by locating data centers as close to users as possible. These “cloud edge” data centers are placed in metropolitan areas and enable edge computing for residents of these cities. Therefore, which cities are selected to host edge data centers determines who has the fastest access to applications requiring edge compute — creating a digital divide between those closest and furthest from the edge. In this study we measure latency to the current and predicted cloud edge of three major cloud providers around the world. Our measurements use the RIPE Atlas platform targeting cloud regions, AWS Local Zones, and network optimization services that minimize the path to the cloud edge. An analysis of the digital divide shows rising inequality as the relative difference between users closest and farthest from cloud compute increases. We also find this inequality unfairly affects lower income census tracts in the US. This result is extended globally using remotely sensed night time lights as a proxy for wealth. Finally, we demonstrate that low earth orbit satellite internet can help to close this digital divide and provide more fair access to the cloud edge.more » « less
-
High capacity end-to-end approaches for human motion (behavior) prediction have the ability to represent subtle nuances in human behavior, but struggle with robustness to out of distribution inputs and tail events. Planning-based prediction, on the other hand, can reliably output decent-but-not-great predictions: it is much more stable in the face of distribution shift (as we verify in this work), but it has high inductive bias, missing important aspects that drive human decisions, and ignoring cognitive biases that make human behavior suboptimal. In this work, we analyze one family of approaches that strive to get the best of both worlds: use the end-to-end predictor on common cases, but do not rely on it for tail events / out-of-distribution inputs -- switch to the planning-based predictor there. We contribute an analysis of different approaches for detecting when to make this switch, using an autonomous driving domain. We find that promising approaches based on ensembling or generative modeling of the training distribution might not be reliable, but that there very simple methods which can perform surprisingly well -- including training a classifier to pick up on tell-tale issues in predicted trajectories.more » « less
-
Knowledge about the geographic locations of Internet routers and servers is highly valuable for research on various aspects of Internet structure, performance, economics, and security. Whereas databases for geolocation are commercially available and targeted mostly at end hosts, RIPE offers an open IPmap platform, including its single-radius engine, for geolocation of core Internet infrastructure. This paper introduces the research community to the IPmap single-radius engine and evaluates effectiveness of this method versus commercial geolocation databases NetAcuity and GeoLite2. Access to ground truth constitutes a major challenge in conducting such evaluation studies. The paper collects IP addresses for its study from three sources: virtual machines from the Ring of the Netherlands Network Operators’ Group, M-Lab Pods operated by Google, and CAIDA’s Ark monitors. The ground truth dataset is further diversified through addition of IP addresses that are small latency away from Ark monitors. The evaluation considers accuracy, coverage, and consistency of geolocation as well as effectiveness of the single-radius method for different types of autonomous systems. The paper manually analyzes a problematic case where single-radius mistakenly geolocates an IP address of a Budapest-based router to Vienna. Finally, the paper provides recommendations to both users and developers of the single-radius method and discusses limitations of the reported evaluation. The main conclusion is that the IPmap single-radius engine geolocates core Internet infrastructure more accurately than the considered commercial databases and that Internet researchers can greatly benefit from using the IPmap platform for their geolocation needs.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
