Thanks for the lead on research feedback session at NANOG - sounds very
useful. Guess I need to whip out an abstract pretty quickly.
Due to policy constraints the commercial Internet more closely mimics
a collection of decentralized networks.
It is the collection of several competitive decentralized networks that
has caused the collective Internet not to be a decentralized network,
and more along the lines of what was discussed in the previous post.
But during a disaster, capacity is capacity.
No doubt there is lots of capacity and plenty of it is as you
describe "shadow capacity". Several studies have found backbone
utilization to be as low as 10-15% on average. An often asked question
is not if there is extra capacity in case of disaster but the ability
to provide multi-proivder cooperation to take advantage of it -
assuming that the problem is alrge enough cannot be handled by
providers individually.
The missing piece from most of the previous papers I've
read is how do you find out how much unused capacity exists?
Yup - capacity is the missing piece, largely because the data is
considered proprietary and cannot be obtained through non-invasive
probing. Running a path char takes aggggessssss and is not really
practical. Trying to put together a model based on advertised link
capacity is sketchy at best, but might be useful for a best case
scenario.
The operational community comes back out from
behindthe curtain and tells the research community our network
doesn't have
that problem. And if it did, its fixed now
A nice analogy of the stats quo, but the problem is it is like going up
on the Eiffel tower and trying to get a view of Paris by looking
through a toliet paper tube. You suffer from tunnel vision. It would
seem to get an accurate picture you need to look at the aggregate and
not just individual networks. Then you get the proprietary rub and you
are back to square one. Government types get edgy and point fingers
and the providers say that there is not a problem. There are several
ways this can play out, and I would hope none of which would involve
the big R word - regulation.