Abstract:
The Internet is a network of networks. Understanding where and how these
networks interconnect is important for the purpose of meaningfully investigating a wide
range of critical Internet-related problems, such as the vulnerability of the Internet to
physical damage. While there is published work on Internet topology and structure,
those studies focus primarily on finding the existence of network interconnections and
characterizing the structure of the Internet by those relationships. What this thesis seeks
to investigate is a methodology that helps to determine where these interconnections, or
'cross connects', are happening at the city-level. We evaluate a method for collecting
cross connect data that uses geo-located vantage points and targets. We then investigate
the feasibility of using distributions of round trip times to estimate a threshold for
separating cross connects that occurred within a city from those that occurred outside of
a city. We utilized this method to investigate the cross connects in 17 cities across the
United States. Preliminary findings indicate that this method is viable in certain cities.
The study also identified several trends that warrant further investigation.
Description:
86 pages. A thesis presented to the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Science, Spring 2016.