Abstract

Reachability is thought of as the most basic service provided by today’s Internet. Unfortunately, this does not imply that the community has a deep understanding of it. Researchers and operators rely on two views of reachability to assess it: control/routing- and data-plane measurements.

Both control- and data-plane measurements suffer from different biases and have their own limited visibility. In this talk, we illustrate some of these biases, and show how to design controlled experiments which allow us to “see” through the limitations of previous measurement techniques. For example, we discover the extent of default routing and its impact on reachability. This explains some of the unexpected results from studies that measured the correlation between the control and the data plane.

Bio: Olaf Maennel is a lecturer in computer science at Loughborough University since September 2009. Before that he was at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin, Germany. From 2005 until 2008 he was a post-doc researcher at the School of Mathematical Science of the University of Adelaide in South Australia working with Matthew Roughan. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2005 from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in the group of Anja Feldmann. His research interests are routing in core networks, next generation internet technology, network debugging, active routing measurements, as well as configuration management. He also serves in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on IPv6 deployment and A+P.