[Air-l] Data

[Ren Reynolds]

I'm not sure what you tying to capture here. 

When you say you have data that shows gross traffic - but I wonder what
that traffic is. A few thoughts on this (dredging my old ISP days):

Data on the internet flows either within networks (Autonomous Systems -
generally switched flow) or between networks (where routing comes into
play at peering points (either public or private) / NAPs (Network Access
Point) see BGP generally). 

But if we look at flow between say London and Paris one could try to
estimate data going into LINX (the main London NAP) and out of SFINX
(the Paris one).

But in Europe there are lots of international / pan European single AS
networks, so this traffic will not show up on in some analysis unless it
has to ingress or exit from / to a peer. 

Then there is the fact that traffic that does exit at say LINX may in
fact just be hoping transatlantic.  

And lastly there are many more peering points just in the two cities I
have mentioned. 

Unless things have moved on since I looked at this stuff, you can't
geographically source IP packets across networks (if you have your own
network sure you can do that). 

I'm sure you can get data that basically shows very gross traffic in and
out of the major 'nodes' around the world so you could work out relative
traffic levels, but an actual city to city matrix flow - I'd love to see
that, in fact I'd possibly pay good money to see that. 

Sorry if this misses the point and /or I'm a few years behind in the
tech.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com


-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-admin at aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin at aoir.org] On Behalf Of
Justin Rosenthal
Sent: 19 May 2004 21:28
To: air-l at aoir.org
Subject: [Air-l] Data

Hello all,

I am interested in hearing any thoughts you have on a data problem that
I 
have, that I am sure many of you have approached, and which is, of
course, a 
result of the structure of the Internet itself.  In my ideal world, I
would be 
able to build a relational database of data traffic between the largest
cities 
worldwide.  The data I have found shows gross data traffic between
nodes, 
which includes traffic originated in third-party cities and destined for

fourth-party cities, for example, and which does not provide an estimate
of 
the traffic originated in 3 and destined for 4.  This means that the
data 
doesn't relate every node in the city system to every other in terms of 
network traffic inbound and outbound.  Have you approached this problem?
Do 
you have any thoughts on how currently available data can be patched for

network analysis, or how such a relational database could be built in
the 
future?

Many thanks,

Justin

_____________________________________
Justin Rosenthal
MA Candidate - Social Science
University of Chicago
jrr at uchicago.edu

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