465 research outputs found
Regional Address Registries, Governance and Internet Freedom
Regional Internet Address Registries (RIRs) are private, nonprofit and transnational governance entities that evolved organically with the growth of the Internet to manage and coordinate Internet Protocol addresses. The RIR's management of Internet address resources is becoming more contentious and more central to global debates over Internet governance. This is happening because of two transformational problems: 1) the depletion of the IPv4 address space; and 2) the attempt to introduce more security into the Internet routing system. We call these problems "transformational" because they raise the stakes of the RIR's policy decisions, make RIR processes more formal and institutionalized, and have the potential to create new, more centralized control mechanisms over Internet service providers and users. A danger in this transition is that the higher stakes and centralized control mechanisms become magnets for political contention, just as ICANN's control of the DNS root did. In order to avoid a repeat of the problems of ICANN, we need to think carefully about the relationship between RIRs, governments, and Internet freedom. In particular, we need to shield RIRs from interference by national governments, and strengthen and institutionalize their status as neutral technical coordinators with limited influence over other areas of Internet governance
Joining the information society : access issues for Europeans
Abstract not availableeconomics of technology ;
ECHO Facts for Users 3/93
ECHO = European Community Humanitarian Offic
Internet, a Political Issue for Europe (1970's-2010's)
How has the Internet come about in Europe? How did the "network of networks" and ICTs become political stakes for EU institutions? This chapter proposes to shed light on facts, limits and tensions of the building of a political Union in the ICT regulation field. It analyses the role of various stakeholders, from technical experts to ordinary citizens, according to an historical approach structured around three key notions: appropriating, governing and using the Internet. By studying a relatively long period (from the 1970s to the early 2010s), and by observing the Internet as a tool for both internal consolidation, and for asserting the EU on the international stage, we intend to map out the main features and trends that structure the European relationship to the "network of networks". We thus show that the Internet's political dimension encompasses numerous and heterogeneous issues in the European context
Optimization of BGP Convergence and Prefix Security in IP/MPLS Networks
Multi-Protocol Label Switching-based networks are the backbone of the operation of the Internet, that communicates through the use of the Border Gateway Protocol which connects distinct networks, referred to as Autonomous Systems, together. As the technology matures, so does the challenges caused by the extreme growth rate of the Internet. The amount of BGP prefixes required to facilitate such an increase in connectivity introduces multiple new critical issues, such as with the scalability and the security of the aforementioned Border Gateway Protocol.
Illustration of an implementation of an IP/MPLS core transmission network is formed through the introduction of the four main pillars of an Autonomous System: Multi-Protocol Label Switching, Border Gateway Protocol, Open Shortest Path First and the Resource Reservation Protocol. The symbiosis of these technologies is used to introduce the practicalities of operating an IP/MPLS-based ISP network with traffic engineering and fault-resilience at heart.
The first research objective of this thesis is to determine whether the deployment of a new BGP feature, which is referred to as BGP Prefix Independent Convergence (PIC), within AS16086 would be a worthwhile endeavour. This BGP extension aims to reduce the convergence delay of BGP Prefixes inside of an IP/MPLS Core Transmission Network, thus improving the networks resilience against faults.
Simultaneously, the second research objective was to research the available mechanisms considering the protection of BGP Prefixes, such as with the implementation of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure and the Artemis BGP Monitor for proactive and reactive security of BGP prefixes within AS16086.
The future prospective deployment of BGPsec is discussed to form an outlook to the future of IP/MPLS network design. As the trust-based nature of BGP as a protocol has become a distinct vulnerability, thus necessitating the use of various technologies to secure the communications between the Autonomous Systems that form the network to end all networks, the Internet
Methods for revealing and reshaping the African Internet Ecosystem as a case study for developing regions: from isolated networks to a connected continent
Mención Internacional en el título de doctorWhile connecting end-users worldwide, the Internet increasingly promotes local development
by making challenges much simpler to overcome, regardless of the field in which it is
used: governance, economy, education, health, etc. However, African Network Information Centre
(AfriNIC), the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) of Africa, is characterized by the lowest Internet
penetration: 28.6% as of March 2017 compared to an average of 49.7% worldwide according
to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates [139]. Moreover, end-users experience
a poor Quality of Service (QoS) provided at high costs. It is thus of interest to enlarge the
Internet footprint in such under-connected regions and determine where the situation can be improved.
Along these lines, this doctoral thesis thoroughly inspects, using both active and passive
data analysis, the critical aspects of the African Internet ecosystem and outlines the milestones of
a methodology that could be adopted for achieving similar purposes in other developing regions.
The thesis first presents our efforts to help build measurements infrastructures for alleviating
the shortage of a diversified range of Vantage Points (VPs) in the region, as we cannot improve
what we can not measure. It then unveils our timely and longitudinal inspection of the
African interdomain routing using the enhanced RIPE Atlas measurements infrastructure for filling
the lack of knowledge of both IPv4 and IPv6 topologies interconnecting local Internet Service
Providers (ISPs). It notably proposes reproducible data analysis techniques suitable for the treatment
of any set of similar measurements to infer the behavior of ISPs in the region. The results
show a large variety of transit habits, which depend on socio-economic factors such as the language,
the currency area, or the geographic location of the country in which the ISP operates.
They indicate the prevailing dominance of ISPs based outside Africa for the provision of intracontinental
paths, but also shed light on the efforts of stakeholders for traffic localization.
Next, the thesis investigates the causes and impacts of congestion in the African IXP substrate,
as the prevalence of this endemic phenomenon in local Internet markets may hinder their
growth. Towards this end, Ark monitors were deployed at six strategically selected local Internet
eXchange Points (IXPs) and used for collecting Time-Sequence Latency Probes (TSLP) measurements
during a whole year. The analysis of these datasets reveals no evidence of widespread
congestion: only 2.2% of the monitored links experienced noticeable indication of congestion,
thus promoting peering. The causes of these events were identified during IXP operator interviews,
showing how essential collaboration with stakeholders is to understanding the causes of performance degradations.
As part of the Internet Society (ISOC) strategy to allow the Internet community to profile
the IXPs of a particular region and monitor their evolution, a route-collector data analyzer was
then developed and afterward, it was deployed and tested in AfriNIC. This open source web
platform titled the “African” Route-collectors Data Analyzer (ARDA) provides metrics, which
picture in real-time the status of interconnection at different levels, using public routing information
available at local route-collectors with a peering viewpoint of the Internet. The results
highlight that a small proportion of Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) assigned by AfriNIC
(17 %) are peering in the region, a fraction that remained static from April to September 2017
despite the significant growth of IXPs in some countries. They show how ARDA can help detect
the impact of a policy on the IXP substrate and help ISPs worldwide identify new interconnection
opportunities in Africa, the targeted region.
Since broadening the underlying network is not useful without appropriately provisioned services
to exploit it, the thesis then delves into the availability and utilization of the web infrastructure
serving the continent. Towards this end, a comprehensive measurement methodology
is applied to collect data from various sources. A focus on Google reveals that its content infrastructure
in Africa is, indeed, expanding; nevertheless, much of its web content is still served
from the United States (US) and Europe, although being the most popular content source in many
African countries. Further, the same analysis is repeated across top global and regional websites,
showing that even top African websites prefer to host their content abroad. Following that, the
primary bottlenecks faced by Content Providers (CPs) in the region such as the lack of peering
between the networks hosting our probes and poorly configured DNS resolvers are explored to
outline proposals for further ISP and CP deployments.
Considering the above, an option to enrich connectivity and incentivize CPs to establish a
presence in the region is to interconnect ISPs present at isolated IXPs by creating a distributed
IXP layout spanning the continent. In this respect, the thesis finally provides a four-step interconnection
scheme, which parameterizes socio-economic, geographical, and political factors using
public datasets. It demonstrates that this constrained solution doubles the percentage of continental
intra-African paths, reduces their length, and drastically decreases the median of their Round
Trip Times (RTTs) as well as RTTs to ASes hosting the top 10 global and top 10 regional Alexa
websites. We hope that quantitatively demonstrating the benefits of this framework will incentivize
ISPs to intensify peering and CPs to increase their presence, for enabling fast, affordable,
and available access at the Internet frontier.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: David Fernández Cambronero.- Secretario: Alberto García Martínez.- Vocal: Cristel Pelsse
- …