RIP (Re-architecting the Internet Protocols)

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Faculty  Tom Anderson  Arvind Krishnamurthy  David Wetherall  John Zahorjan Students  Colin Dixon  John John  Ethan Katz-Bassett  Harsha Madhyastha  Ratul Mahajan  Michael Piatek  Charlie Reis  Maya Rodrig

RIP Overview RIP (Re-architecting the Internet Protocols) is an umbrella project that draws together several smaller projects, each of which shares the theme of improving the Internet where it is weak while preserving the functionality that has made it strong. Paradoxically, though  the Internet has been an astounding engineering triumph, it now faces huge technical problems because it is fragile, insecure and poorly optimized. As just one example, worldwide spending on cleaning up after viruses, worms, and spam -- that is, spending on the consequences of connecting to the Internet -- is much larger than the worldwide spending on Internet connectivity itself! The goal of our research is to fix the myriad problems with the Internet by re-thinking its design from first principles.  Our RIP activities are organized along the lines of the inter-related projects below. We draw inspiration from another architecture project, Taliesin West. This building was designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright and his students for their own use, out of materials found in the local area, to exist in harmony with its desert setting. Many of the ideas in RIP are likewise from our students, using the building blocks we have at our disposal, and designed to draw strength from rather than oppose the trends in the Internet's underlying technologies and use.  Reverse engineering the Internet. Remarkably, there is very little quantitative data about the Internet's behavior. In large part, this is because the Internet is operated by a loose federation of tens of thousands of organizations, at turns both competing and cooperating with each other to provide Internet service to end users. Almost all Internet service providers consider details of their internal operation to be confidential. To provide a robust understanding of how the Internet really behaves, we are systematically measuring every aspect of the Internet's behavior, from topology and provisioning, to intra- and inter-domain routing policies, to failures and misconfigurations, to workload. A key insight is to leverage and integrate the various sources of information that leak out from service about their internal operation, in much the same way that astronomers infer stellar structure from the evidence which reaches our telescopes. Reverse Engineering the Internet is our manifesto for a comprehensive and collaborative Internet measurement and inferencing effort. Internet Astronomy is our follow-on project from Rocketfuel, the Internet mapping engine that produced detailed ISP maps. Scriptroute is an open, extensible facility for Internet measurement that runs on PlanetLab. tulip is a set of tools for diagnosing end-to-end path performance. Robust and secure protocols The Internet is at times amazingly robust and at times incredibly fragile. Faced with multiple simultaneous hardware failures, the Internet will (more or less quickly) re-organize itself to reestablish connectivity. But the Internet is not equally robust to software errors, configuration mistakes, and selfish actions. Even without malicious attack, small errors have repeatedly cascaded to cause massive disruptions in Internet service. We are designing strengthened protocols that work well despite these other kinds of faults. TVA (Traffic Validation Architecture) is an incrementally deployable means of countering Internet denial-of-service attacks. Wiser is an Internet routing protocol (an extension of BGP) that uses barter to provide efficient paths despite self-interested ISP behavior. Understanding BGP Misconfiguration is an empirical study of global routing mistakes and their effects on the Internet. Robust Congestion Signaling is an example of a design for congestion signaling that can tolerate implementation errors. Network Support for IP Traceback pioneered the probabilistic marking approach to tracing denial-of-service attacks. Effective management of Internet resources Popular mythology is that Internet bandwidth is getting exponentially cheaper each year, and soon will be essentially free. Indeed, it almost is -- it costs a penny to send a 10MB file across the Internet. So there's no need to carefully manage resources, right? The truth is more complex: computing is becoming cheaper at a much faster rate than networking bandwidth, in large part because computing equipment is a much higher volume business than wide area networking gear, and therefore can leverage enormous economies of scale. For comparison, that same penny will buy you 100 giga-ops of computing! More importantly, the curves are diverging over time, and we believe this will long term trend will radically alter the Internet's architecture. How should we architect the Internet for a world where computing is free, networks are cheap, and people are expensive? We should build a system that is self-managing, is optimized for end-user performance, and uses computing throughout to get more efficient use out of networking hardware. The RIP sub-projects share this vision and its underlying tradeoffs. Extensibility Of course, all this is academic if we can't figure out a way to change the Internet. We are a founding member of PlanetLab, a worldwide network of computers for developing and deploying new protocols and distributed services. The Scriptroute extensible network measurement facility was one of the first services to be deployed on PlanetLab. Part of our vision is to smooth the path from research idea to validation, from more realistic topologies for simulation via Rocketfuel to deployment on PlanetLab. We also focus on making protocols themselves easier to extend. Planetlab and its successor GENI are flexible wide-area, large-scale testbeds that support new network services and architectures. STP is a TCP stack that can be safely extended from either endpoint. Active Names provides extensibility via flexible name resolution. ANTS is a Java-based active network toolkit for developing new network protocols. Last update 11.17.2005 by djw

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