23,193 research outputs found
Global Networks of Trade and Bits
Considerable efforts have been made in recent years to produce detailed
topologies of the Internet. Although Internet topology data have been brought
to the attention of a wide and somewhat diverse audience of scholars, so far
they have been overlooked by economists. In this paper, we suggest that such
data could be effectively treated as a proxy to characterize the size of the
"digital economy" at country level and outsourcing: thus, we analyse the
topological structure of the network of trade in digital services (trade in
bits) and compare it with that of the more traditional flow of manufactured
goods across countries. To perform meaningful comparisons across networks with
different characteristics, we define a stochastic benchmark for the number of
connections among each country-pair, based on hypergeometric distribution.
Original data are thus filtered by means of different thresholds, so that we
only focus on the strongest links, i.e., statistically significant links. We
find that trade in bits displays a sparser and less hierarchical network
structure, which is more similar to trade in high-skill manufactured goods than
total trade. Lastly, distance plays a more prominent role in shaping the
network of international trade in physical goods than trade in digital
services.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure
Dovetail: Stronger Anonymity in Next-Generation Internet Routing
Current low-latency anonymity systems use complex overlay networks to conceal
a user's IP address, introducing significant latency and network efficiency
penalties compared to normal Internet usage. Rather than obfuscating network
identity through higher level protocols, we propose a more direct solution: a
routing protocol that allows communication without exposing network identity,
providing a strong foundation for Internet privacy, while allowing identity to
be defined in those higher level protocols where it adds value.
Given current research initiatives advocating "clean slate" Internet designs,
an opportunity exists to design an internetwork layer routing protocol that
decouples identity from network location and thereby simplifies the anonymity
problem. Recently, Hsiao et al. proposed such a protocol (LAP), but it does not
protect the user against a local eavesdropper or an untrusted ISP, which will
not be acceptable for many users. Thus, we propose Dovetail, a next-generation
Internet routing protocol that provides anonymity against an active attacker
located at any single point within the network, including the user's ISP. A
major design challenge is to provide this protection without including an
application-layer proxy in data transmission. We address this challenge in path
construction by using a matchmaker node (an end host) to overlap two path
segments at a dovetail node (a router). The dovetail then trims away part of
the path so that data transmission bypasses the matchmaker. Additional design
features include the choice of many different paths through the network and the
joining of path segments without requiring a trusted third party. We develop a
systematic mechanism to measure the topological anonymity of our designs, and
we demonstrate the privacy and efficiency of our proposal by simulation, using
a model of the complete Internet at the AS-level
A critical look at power law modelling of the Internet
This paper takes a critical look at the usefulness of power law models of the
Internet. The twin focuses of the paper are Internet traffic and topology
generation. The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly it summarises the state of
the art in power law modelling particularly giving attention to existing open
research questions. Secondly it provides insight into the failings of such
models and where progress needs to be made for power law research to feed
through to actual improvements in network performance.Comment: To appear Computer Communication
Chinese Internet AS-level Topology
We present the first complete measurement of the Chinese Internet topology at
the autonomous systems (AS) level based on traceroute data probed from servers
of major ISPs in mainland China. We show that both the Chinese Internet AS
graph and the global Internet AS graph can be accurately reproduced by the
Positive-Feedback Preference (PFP) model with the same parameters. This result
suggests that the Chinese Internet preserves well the topological
characteristics of the global Internet. This is the first demonstration of the
Internet's topological fractality, or self-similarity, performed at the level
of topology evolution modeling.Comment: This paper is a preprint of a paper submitted to IEE Proceedings on
Communications and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology
Copyright. If accepted, the copy of record will be available at IET Digital
Librar
- âŚ