Dimes: A distributed internet measurement infrastructure: rational, architecture, and results

Due to the Internet structure and routing the only way to map its topology is by having measurement presence in almost every corner of the Internet. Managing thousands of measurement boxes is impractical, thus, we sugget instead a light-weight software measurement agent to be downloaded by volunteers around the world. The DIMES agent can be executed on every PC (and in the future even smaller devices, like PDAs) and enables us to map the Internet and track its evolution in time in several levels of granularity from the fine router level to the coarse Autonomous System (AS)level. Currently, DIMES has over 4300 installations in the 75 nations around the world, which produce over 5 million measurements a day.

The talk will describe the rational behind DIMES, and explore some of our results, at the AS, router, and IP level. We will also describe our vision to build an Internet evolution model that takes into account external stimuli like economic growth, and show some example of the strong connection between the Internet structure and world economics.