Wednesday, October 29, 2014

HotNets 2014: An AS for Us

Scribe notes by Athina Markopoulou.


PEERING: An AS for Us (presented by Ethan-Katz Bassett)
This work developed a testbed that allows researchers to configure an ISP (PEERING) and experiment with it. PEERING has its own AS number and IP address space and it peers with real ISPs. In particular, PEERING routers peer with 6 universities and providers. Richer connectivity is provided via peers at AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange) and Phoenix-IX. When researchers configure this AS are allowed to only advertise prefixes that PEERING owes, not other people’s prefixes (so as to not become transit). The speaker then explained the use of the testbed through the motivating example of ARROW.

PEERING provides a sweet spot between realism (running things over the Internet) and control (by configuring this ISP). It can be used to enable running experiments for inter-domain routing research. The speaker concluded with a call to the community to use the testbed and propose new features.

Q& A (during panel discussion, some of them addressed to all papers)

Q: How do we know that we measure the Internet and not your infrastructure?
A: Right now documentation, we also plan to keep logs.

Q: Scalability issues?
A: It mainly depends on the number of prefixes we own.

Q: Have you thought about using IPv6?
A: We plan to look into that.

Q: Are ISPs concerned about their policies being inferred/exposed?
A: To our experience, there is no pushback from ISPs. They know their own policy but they don’t have the global picture, so they actually want more visibility.

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