Lecture 3-Project Descriptions and Internet measurements

08.31.2010-

First part of the lecture was about the final projects which are expected to be a professional paper at the end of the semester. We learned what it should be and not be in terms of network model, analysis and theory development. Project studies should include not only a literature review or just a measurement of network characteristics, but also a well interpretation of measurement results, visualization and comparison with other networks.

In the second part of the lecture we dealt with the internet measurements. Although complex networks cover many wide areas in addition to computer networks, internet is a very characteristic example of complex networks. For a better understanding of itself and due to many social, economic and technical issues, internet topology measurements is of crucial importance. Traceroute program is a basic way of discovering internet topology. By incrementing the TTL value at each node, it tries to figure out all the intermediate nodes between a source and a destination. By probing many destinations with traceroute, interconnection of routers can be detected. However, there are many problems with traceroute, like unresponsive routers and alias resolution problem. Such problems may cause incorrect mapping of the internet topology.

Traffic measurement is also an important part of internet measurements. Finally, spread characteristics of well-known computer viruses has been demonstrated in order to explain the importance of internet monitoring and traffic measurements. We saw that within several minutes they can cover most of the vulnerable hosts on the world.