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We propose to research and develop a suite of tools to use trilateration (https://www.e-education.psu.edu/natureofgeoinfo/c5_p12.html) techniques to locate hosts. In particuilar, we will focus on the needs for locating Internet routers. We plan to use Round Trip Time (RTT) measurements made by a ping-based tool from Measurement Agents (MAs) located around the world to the targets, in particular, the routers at traceroute hops. The RTTs are then converted to distance between the MA and target to input to the trilateration.
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We will start with perfSONAR MAs and PingER MAs. A map of the initial MAs can be seen below. The red dots are MAs in the PingER project, the green dots are perfSONAR MAs.
We will maintain a database of these MAs including their name, IP address, web site, physical address, and location, etc.. We will also test these MAs at regular intervals to ensure they are working and update the database of reachable active MAs accordingly. We will also contact associates, particularly in Pakistan, to add more MAs.
Populating the router location database
We will maintain a database of router locations. To populate this we will identify representative targets in regions of the world and carriers, and make regular traceroutes from the MAs to the targets and use the geolocation to locate the unknown positions of the routers at each hop. Having a database of router locations will mean the interactively locating the routes in a traceroute will be much faster and interactive. If the router location are is not in the database when a user requests a visual traceroute then the results result will be added to the database.
To assist in populating this database, we will also develop a tool to provide a traceroute archive. The traceroutes will be made from a an MA at Stanford in the US and a second in Pakistan in Islamabad to over multiple end hosts in over 160 countries (see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-mon/viper/pinger-coverage-gmap.html for a map of the target hosts). The measurements will be made regularly (initially daily) and databasearchived. The masurementsmeasurements, will be accessible via the web, together with an analysis and comparison of the tracreroutes traceroutes for 3 selected days (by default the most recent three days).
Traceroute visualization tool
Outcomes
A web based tool to vizualize traceroutes.
A study of the accuracy of the predictions and the impact of different numbers of MAs, their RTTs and distance to the target.
A database of the locations of Internet routers.
A publicly accessible archive of traceroutes.