Project Overview
Illuminating the practices of Internet service providers
Department(s)
Computer Science
Abstract
As society’s reliance on the Internet–for communication, education, healthcare, transportation, and much more–continues to grow, so does the importance of having a trustworthy Internet. In particular, there is an increasing need for transparent, accountable, and controllable forwarding of data over the Internet. In previous work, Aaron and a student (Emily Huff ‘20) developed a tool for inferring Internet service providers’ (ISPs’) stance on net neutrality (i.e., giving all data equal forwarding priority) based on publicly available articles and documents. The goal of this project is to provide more transparency into ISPs’ practices–ranging from net neutrality to energy efficiency–through the use of active network measurements. Towards this end, students will:
- Review existing literature on detecting traffic differentiation (i.e., non-net-neutral forwarding), inferring equipment models/configurations, and estimating network equipments’ power consumption;
- Explore existing network measurement data and algorithms to determine what information can be inferred using existing data/techniques;
- Enhance one or more measurement techniques to obtain additional pertinent information about ISPs’ data forwarding practices/infrastructure;
- Produce a publicly accessible report summarizing the practices of several major ISPs.
Student Qualifications
Students must know Python (covered in COSC 101) and basic data structures (covered in COSC 102). Students must also be familiar with more sophisticated data structures and algorithms (covered in COSC 202) and/or computer systems (covered in COSC 208). Students are not expected to have any background in networking.
In their application, students should discuss:
- Why this specific project interests them
- How research in computer science aligns with their long term goals
- The COSC courses they have/will complete by the summer
- Any prior research or internship experience in computer science
Number of Student Researchers
2 students
Project Length
8 weeks