Literature review by Gerald Ngumbulu
Project Overview
With the continued growth of the internet comes the research challenge of recreating a topology representation of all the interconnected internet elements within a region. Such a topology would be useful to be able to conduct different types of further research on the internet such as effectiveness of content distribution network strategies or analysing traffic routing patterns and how they can be optimized. However, currently, each such researcher has to go through the whole process of taking internet measurements and mapping the topology themselves before embarking on the core of their research, which is a time consuming exercise. Therefore the need was seen to create a single unified platform that regularly collects internet measurements and represents them on a topology map, hence at any time reflecting the latest state of the internet at that time. This would be useful to researchers as they can simply just use the tool to get the data they need for their research. Furthermore, the platform would need to allow researchers to simulate different traffic scenarios by adding or removing nodes or links for instance.
Our project task was hence to create a version of such a platform. Specifically, our platform would only focus on Africa and create the topology at an Autonomous System (AS) level. An AS is a network of routers controlled by a single organization (university, company, internet service provider etc.)
The results of this project are detailed further in the rest of the website. The project was divided into 3 parts:
- Internet Measurements done by Gerald Ngumbulu
- Data Processing and Visualization done by Blessed Chitamba
- Simulation done by Willie Macharia
