What does a map of the Internet look like? It’s a glob of 100,000 intersections wired together.
Last summer the Bell Labs team of Bill Cheswich and Hal Burch set out to make visual sense of the sprawling super interconnection of networks we call the Internet.
 Hal Burch |
 Bill Cheswich |
“The Internet,” says Cheswick and Burch, “has a diameter of about 10,000 pookies,” their whimsy for, “an arbitrary unit of distance in the space in which the maps are laid out.”
At first glance, an observer sees a mush of lines representing major circuits pathways to junction points, hoping to identify the big arrow, “You are here.” But instead, it’s deceptively unfamiliar to graphical maps with North being up, of countries, continents separated by oceans.
The Internet is its own space. So it’s not so easy to point and say: “That’s Tokyo over there, and he’s Chicago.” On the Internet wiring map, they could be next to one another.
This diagram of cables and telephone circuits is dimensionally dissimilar to the relationship of the physical Internet. Much like a house wiring diagram, the light switch may be physically far removed from the actual chandelier. But for simplicity, they are next to one another on the blueprint, minimizing confusion of overlapping lines.
Bill Cheswich says, “Hal and I are running a long-term project to collect routing data on the Internet.” It consists of, “frequent trace-route-style path probes, one to each registered Internet entity. The tree is the visual paths to many, but not all, of the major networks on the Internet.”
“You really can’t use all of the space, since the inside is hidden by the things around it. Bear in mind that these are but a relatively small portion of the entire mapped network.”
Hal Burch is a graduate of mathematics, computer science and physics, and a musician. He is a third year Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. California born but Oklahoma raised, he muses, “for all those who claim I have an southern accent: I don’t know what ya’ll are tallkin’ about.”
Burch says, jokingly, “The mathematical algorithm produces some very nice maps. Look closely in the lower right quadrant to see detail maps of Serbia showing damage during the war.”
“Our programs jostle the nodes around. A typical layout requires 20 hours processing time on a 400MHz Pentium.” In the spirit of sharing, the complete database (100MB of uncompressed data) is available online free, for anyone who would really want it.
Map of the Internet
Multiple plots display the connectivity of the Cyber landscape. Interesting relationships emerge beckoning closer inspection. In one of many numerous sets, the Internet Service Providers are shown in color by country and network capacity. These paths change over time, as routes reconfigure to the growth, and new patterns are revealed.
It’s a huge endeavor. Fiber-optic and telephone lines interconnect thousands of routers that pass on unimaginable number of messages and files to their destinations. These wee intersections are only the most significant central routers. An endpoint might represent a gateway to an ever-expanding tangle of other machines.
To find them, Cheswick programmed their Bell Labs computer to send out a flurry of electronic tracers (packets) from his New Jersey office. The messages were designed to die as they reached intersections or destinations. Electronic “death notices,” as they called them, were returned with an identity to those points.
Burch’s program analyzed and then built the maps from the packet morgue. “The early results looked like a peacock smashed into a windshield,” says Burch. “Though major ISPs could be identified with some interesting details around the edges, the map wasn’t very useful.
We now print the layout for a minimum distance spanning tree on a 36 inch plotter; very close to a nice map.” These maps of the Internet are viewable online and commercially available for purchase.
“How many paths are served by Cable and Wireless? One goal is to continually collect the data and make a time-lapse movie of the growth changes to the Internet.”
An Internet atlas would be most interesting, and a rotating 3D projection is being considered. Tamara Munzner, and her colleagues at Stanford University, are painstakingly investigating the physical locations of these routers. People like John Quarterman are working on the physical Internet map overlaying the geography of the world.
“Maps help you think about things,” says Munzner. Bill Cheswick agrees and adds, “Maps reveal patterns that generate questions for further research.
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Web Links:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ches/map/index.html
http://home.sol.no/~ggunners/NetBird.html
http://order.mids.org/~jsq/index.html
http://www.caida.org/Tools/
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~ches/index.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~hburch/
http://www.cybergeography.org/
http://www.dsiegel.com/tips/index.html
http://www.internetweather.com/
http://www.peacockmaps.com/index.html