CICI: TCR: Building a more Resilient IPv6 from Passive Outage Detection

About This Grant

Today's Internet spans the globe, and Internet Protocol (IP) version 6 (IPv6) is important to meeting the needs of billions of people and tens of billions of computers. Unfortunately IPv6's huge number of addresses means techniques used to observe today's IP version 4 (IPv4) Internet cannot directly apply to IPv6. The goal of the CICI: TCR: Building a more Resilient IPv6 with Passive Outage Detection (BRIPOD) Project is to improve observability of the IPv6 Internet using passive observations of IPv6 data to understand how IPv6 is being used, how reliable it is, and how to improve it and encourage its use. The BRIPOD Project improves the IPv6 Internet in three ways: (1) developing new approaches to observe the IPv6 Internet, and creating IPv6 datasets that can be provided to researchers in ways that safeguard individual privacy; (2) developing new approaches to use such data to detect partial reachability and outages in the IPv6 Internet, and; (3) developing methods to use these approaches to advise network operators about potential network problems and improve IPv6 reliability. The outcomes of this project include: new IPv6 datasets for network research; better understanding of how the IPv6 Internet is similar to, and different from, the IPv4 Internet, including its reliability and how it is used; and encouragement for Research and Education networks to increase deployment of IPv6. This project is a collaboration between the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute and MERIT Networks. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.