RFC 1273 (rfc1273) - Page 2 of 8
Measurement Study of Changes in Service-Level Reachability in the Global TCP/IP Internet: Goals, Experimental Design, Implementation, and Policy Considerations
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1273 A Measurement Study November 1991
study to measure changes in Internet service-level reachability over
a period of one year. The study considers upper layer service
reachability instead of basic IP connectivity because the former
indicates the willingness of organizations to participate in inter-
organizational computing, which will be an important component of
future wide area distributed applications.
The data we gather will contribute to Internet research and
engineering planning activities in a number of ways. The data will
indicate the mechanisms sites use to distance themselves from
Internet connectivity, the types of services that sites are willing
to run (and hence the type of distributed collaboration they are
willing to support), and variations in these characteristics as a
function of geographic location and type of institution (commercial,
educational, etc.). Understanding these trends will allow
application designers and network builders to more realistically plan
for how to support future wide area distributed applications such as
digital library systems, information services, wide area distributed
file systems, and conferencing and other collaboration-support
systems. The measurements will also be of general interest, as they
represent direct measurements of the evolution of a global electronic
society.
Clearly, a study of this nature and magnitude raises a number of
potential concerns. In this note we overview our experimental
design, considerations of network and remote site load, mechanisms
used to control the measurement collection process, and our efforts
to inform sites measured by this study, along with concomitant
network appropriate use and privacy issues.
A point we wish to stress from the outset is that this is not a study
of network security. The experiments do not attempt to probe the
security mechanisms of any machine on the network. The study is
concerned solely with the evolution of network connectivity and
service reachability.
Experimental Design
The study consists of a set of runs of a program over the span of one
to two days each month, repeated bimonthly for a period of one year
(in January 1992, March 1992, May 1992, July 1992, September 1992,
and November 1992). Each program run attempts to connect to 13
different TCP services at each of approximately 12,700 Internet
domains worldwide, recording the failure/success status of each
attempt. The program will attempt no data transfers in either
direction. If a connection is successful, it is simply closed and
counted. (Note in particular that this means that the security
mechanism behind individual network services will not be tested.)
Schwartz