Communications of the ACM
The Internet Isn't Broken. It's Asleep
Researchers at the University of Southern California are attempting to map the Internet's international sleep patterns.
Credit: USC Viterbi
In some parts of the world, the Internet experiences regular downtime, or "sleeps," periodically instead of running 24 hours a day. University of Southern California (USC) researchers are leading an ambitious monitoring project that seeks to map out these "sleep" patterns to better discern normal downtime from major outages.
USC professor John Heidemann and colleagues have been pinging millions of IPv4 address blocks, which collectively represent almost a fourth of the Web, every 11 minutes for two months looking for daily patterns. "This data helps us establish a baseline for the Internet--to understand how it functions, so that we have a better idea of how resilient it is as a whole, and can spot problems quicker," Heidemann says. "We have grown our coverage to 4 million blocks [more than 1 billion addresses] as Internet use grows."
He will be presenting the group's research at the 2014 ACM Internet Measurements Conference on Nov. 5.
So far, his team has found that rich countries are more likely to have the Internet available 24/7. The research is continuing and Heidemann says he hopes long-term observations will help guide Internet operations around the world.
"This work is one of the first to explore how networking policies affect how the network is used," Heidemann says.
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