Foundation Projects

The project operates a large-scale Internet measurement laboratory. The objective is to measure the properties of the network in the same manner as users see the network, by measuring the behaviour of clients of network-hosted services. This is one of the larger measurement systems on the Internet today, if not the largest. The project gathers some 18 million measurement sets per day from all parts of the network.

The measurement infrastructure consists of two parts: The first is a set of advertising campaigns using Google AdWords. These campaigns are configured to get placement as broad as possible across the Internet user base. The ad material contains an HTML5 script that performs a set of URL object fetches. The second part is a set of servers that are in several regional centres that act as targets for the measurement scripts.

Objectives

The project measures the properties of the network in the same manner as users see the network, by measuring the behaviour of clients of network-hosted services. roject uses the following infrastructure to perform both one-off measurements and long baseline measurements:

1. measurement of the use of IPv6 on the Internet,
2. measurement of the use of domain name system security extension (DNSSEC) validation,
3. the use of open domain name system (DNS) resolvers, and
4. deployment of ROV.

One-off measurements include the viability of IPv6 header extensions, the behaviour of Internet protocol (IP) packet fragmentation and the use of various DNSSEC encryption algorithms.

The purpose of these measurements is to inform the community on the capability and state of Internet infrastructure. The data has been used by policy makers in Addressing Policy communities, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) communities, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) studies, and several national regulatory environments, including those of Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Benefits to the Internet community

The benefits to the community are up-to-date, factual measurements concerning the state of Internet infrastructure, continuing existing measurements and expanding them in detail. As noted above, the measurements include IPv6 capability, IPv6 performance, IPv6 fragmentation behaviour including extension header handling, DNSSEC validation, DNS recursive resolver use, and the use and stability of RPKI ROV. The overall object is to inform the community and policy makers on the state of Internet infrastructure and its evolutionary trends.

For budget information, see the relevant annual reports.

Related:

• Annual report 2022