Rocket fuel

The Rocketfuel project, or the Rocketfuel method in general, makes network maps obtained from Internet providers freely available through a combination of various measurement methods ( e.g. traceroute ) . These cards contain information about which routers belong to the network of the mapped provider and how these are connected to one another.

background

The research community that deals with the improvement of the network infrastructure (e.g. researching routing protocols ) depends on detailed maps of the Internet. The term “card” here describes a collection of information about which routers are connected to each other ( topology ) and which paths the data packets take through the network (routing). Since the networks of the individual providers can differ greatly in terms of their structure, it is of considerable importance to be able to compare the different topologies with one another and thus research similarities and differences. Furthermore, for network simulations it is necessary to simulate a network that is as realistic as possible in order to achieve reliable simulation results.

For business reasons, however, providers usually do not make relevant information about the exact structure of their network publicly available. In particular, security concerns (fear of targeted denial-of-service attacks on individual routers or even physical sabotage) play an important role.

The Rocketfuel cards

In order to be able to give the international public research community an insight into the network topology of individual providers, the Rocketfuel project was initiated. The basic idea of ​​the project is to send traceroute measurements across the network to be examined. However, a number of problems arise here (the number of trace route measurements to be carried out can be extremely large; a router usually has several IP addresses , etc.). The Rocketfuel software solves these problems by skillfully combining different data sources (especially BGP data ) and several heuristics .

From the measurements on selected provider networks, “maps” of the examined networks were finally created. These are not maps in the conventional sense, but text files that contain where which router is located, which other routers it is connected to, etc.

The resulting Rocketfuel cards are publicly available and enjoy great popularity and acceptance in the research community. They are therefore used in numerous scientific papers in the field of network research.

Web links

• Homepage of the Rocketfuel Project at the University of Washington
• Scriptroute software

swell

1. Measuring ISP Topologies with Rocketfuel.
   Neil Spring, Ratul Mahajan, and David Wetherall. Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Conference 2002.
2. Inferring Link Weights using End-to-End Measurements.
   Ratul Mahajan, Neil Spring, David Wetherall, and Tom Anderson. Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop (IMW) 2002.
3. Quantifying the Causes of Path Inflation.
   Neil Spring, Ratul Mahajan, and Thomas Anderson. Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Conference 2003.