Internet atlas: a geographic database of the internet

  • Authors:
  • Ramakrishnan Durairajan;Subhadip Ghosh;Xin Tang;Paul Barford;Brian Eriksson

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA;Technicolor Research, Palo Alto, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on HotPlanet
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

This paper describes Internet Atlas, a new visualization and analysis portal for diverse Internet measurement data. The starting point for Atlas is a geographically anchored representation of the physical Internet including (i) nodes (e.g., hosting facilities and data centers), (ii) conduits/links that connect these nodes, and (iii) relevant meta data (e.g., source provenance). This physical representation is built by using search to identify primary source data such as maps and other repositories of service provider network information. This data is then carefully entered into the database using a combination of manual and automated processes including consistency checks and methods for geocoding both node and link data. Atlas currently contains over 9.5K PoP locations and nearly 13.5K links for over 270 networks around the world. Customized interfaces were built to import a variety of dynamic (e.g., BGP updates, Twitter feeds and weather updates) and static (e.g., highway, rail and census) data into Atlas, and to layer it on top of the physical representation. The openly available web portal is based on the widely-used ArcGIS geographic information system, which enables visualization and diverse spatial analyses of the data. We describe the details of the portal implementation as well as on-going efforts to expand its capabilities.