Communications of the ACM
How Natural Disasters and Political nrest Affect the Internet
Northwestern University
Northwestern University researchers have developed software that analyzes how natural disasters and political upheaval affect the Internet.
The researchers at Northwestern's AquaLab, led by Fabian E. Bustamante, analyzed data from about 1.4 million Ono and Network Early Warning System (NEWS) users to study Internet traffic from the user perspective. "By using data from users of our software and collaborators, we're able to see beyond firewalls and [network address translators] and capture the view from the very edge of the network--the users themselves," Bustamante says.
Ono examines the relationship between Internet service providers (ISPs) and their customers who use peer-to-peer (P2P) services and helps BitTorrent peers find others by reusing the network view of other services such as content distribution networks. Ono can provide more than a 30 percent average download rate improvement and up to a 200 percent increase in download rates. NEWS involves P2P users helping to detect Internet performance problems. "You can think of it as crowd-sourcing network monitoring," Bustamante says.
The researchers also can identify the effects of network throttling, which some ISPs use to limit the rate of data transfer to control congestion.
From Northwestern University News Center
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2011 Information Inc. 
, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found