[CSEE Talk] talk: Studying Internet Latency via TCP Queries to DNS, 1:30pm Fri 2/27, ITE456

[Tim Finin]

                             ACM Tech Talk

            Studying Internet Latency via TCP Queries to DNS

                           Dr. Yannis Labrou
                   Principal Data Architect, Verisign

          1:30-2:30pm Friday, 27 February 2015, ITE 456, UMBC

Every day Verisign processes upwards of 100 billion authoritative DNS
requests for .COM and .NET from all corners of the earth. The vast
majority of these requests are via the UDP protocol. Because UDP is
connectionless it is impossible to passively estimate the latency of
the UDP-based requests. A very small percentage of these requests
though, are over TCP thus providing the means to estimate the latency
of specific requests and paths for a subset of the hosts that interact
with Verisign's network infrastructure.

In this work, we combine this relatively small number of datapoints
from TCP (on the order of a few hundred million per day) with the much
larger dataset of all DNS requests.  Our focus is the process of data
analysis of real world, imperfect data at very large scale with the
goals of understanding network latency at an unprecedented magnitude,
identifying large volume, high latency clients and improving their
latency. We discuss the techniques we used for data selection and
analysis and we present the results of a variety of analyses, such as
deriving regional and country patterns, estimations for query latency
for different countries and network locations, and techniques for
identifying high latency clients.

It is important to note that latency results we will report are based
on passive measurements from, essentially, the entire Internet.  For
this experiment we do not have control over the client side -- where
they are, which software, their configuration, their network
congestion.  This is significantly different from latency studied in
any active measurement infrastructure such as Planet Lab, RIPE Atlas,
Thousand Eyes, Catchpoint, etc.


Dr. Yannis Labrou is Principal Data Architect at Verisign Labs where
he leads efforts to create value from the wealth of data that
Verisign's operations generate every day. He brings to Verisign 20
years of experience in conceiving, creating and bringing to fruition
innovations; combining thinking big with laboring through the pains of
materializing ideas. He has done so in an academic environment, at a
startup company, while conducting government and DoD/DARPA sponsored
research and for a global Fortune 200 company.

Before joining Verisign, Dr. Labrou was a Senior Researcher at Fujitsu
Laboratories of America, Director of Technology and member of the
executive staff of PowerMarket, an enterprise application software
start-up company and a Research Assistant Professor at UMBC.  He
received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC, where his research
focused on software agents, and a Diploma in Physics from the
University of Athens, Greece. He has authored more than 40
peer-reviewed publications, with almost 4000 citations and he has been
awarded 14 patents from the USPTO. His current research focus is dataq
through the entire lifecycle from generation to monetization.

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