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Summary: Reverse Engineering the Internet
Neil Spring, David Wetherall, and Thomas Anderson
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Abstract--To provide insight into Internet operation and
performance, recent efforts have measured various aspects
of the Internet, developing and improving measurement
tools in the process. In this paper, we argue that these in-
dependent advances present the community with a startling
opportunity: the collaborative reverse-engineering of the In-
ternet. By this, we mean annotating a map of the Inter-
net with properties such as: client populations, features and
workloads; network ownership, capacity, connectivity, geog-
raphy and routing policies; patterns of loss, congestion, fail-
ure and growth; and so forth. This combination of properties
is greater than the sum of its parts, and exposes the attributes
of network design easily overlooked by simpler, uncorrelated
models. We argue that reverse engineering the Internet is
feasible based on continuing improvements in measurement
techniques, the potential to infer new properties from exter-
nal measurements, and an accounting of the resources re-
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