1 / 13

Internet Statistics – Facts and Figures

Internet Statistics – Facts and Figures. 1 st Tutorial Session for CEG3180B January 18 th , 2005. First things first: Internet?. Probably the most used example when it comes to Wide Area Networks (WANs) Originally a DoD project [1], it has become the most widely used public internetwork

michi
Download Presentation

Internet Statistics – Facts and Figures

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Internet Statistics – Facts and Figures 1st Tutorial Session for CEG3180B January 18th, 2005

  2. First things first: Internet? • Probably the most used example when it comes to Wide Area Networks (WANs) • Originally a DoD project [1], it has become the most widely used public internetwork • It is the most technologically heterogeneous network ever to exist, short for one aspect: TCP/IP

  3. Why Internet Statistics? • Question: Why would we be interested in the Internet host count trends? • Several pertinent answers: • Curiosity  • Bandwidth consumption (i.e., traffic) forecasting • Address space usage forecasting • … etc.

  4. Well, how many are they? • How many what? • Hosts • Originally, a host was a single computer on the network • With the introduction of virtual hosts, however, a single computer could represent more than one host • So… should we count virtual hosts too or not? • According to the ISC, in June 2004 there were about 300 million hosts in the Internet

  5. What does this survey tell us? • Basically, that the number of hosts in the Internet is growing exponentially: • This means that the “Internet population” doubles approximately… • … every 15 months!

  6. How does the survey work? • It is a Domain Name System (DNS) [3] survey • What is the Domain Name System? • A hierarchical (i.e., similar to the postal address system) way to name hosts in order to set a correspondence between domain names and IP [4] addresses • Top-level domains: .com, .net, .edu, .mil, .gov, .org, .int (and the more recent .biz, .info, .to etc.) and the country top-level domains • Second-level domains: usually (but not always) organizations • E.g., www.uottawa.ca means ‘the web server’ (www) ‘of the University of Ottawa’ (uottawa) ‘which is in Canada’ (ca)

  7. How does the survey work? (2) • Two methods: • Walking the domain name tree and doing zone transfers of domain data in order to discover hosts and further subdomains (original method, used until 1997) • Walking the reverse delegation zones (i.e., in-addr.arpa) and counting all addresses that have been assigned a domain name (new method, used since 1998)

  8. Is the survey accurate? • Question: How far can we trust these results? • Answer: They will have to do it. • Neither of the two survey methods is free of errors – it is virtually impossible to know the exact number of hosts in the internet • However, a good approximation should be sufficient

  9. Is the survey accurate? (2) • Reasons for the surveys not being able to provide error-free results: • Many DNS servers do not allow for whole zone transfers • Not all hosts are registered in a domain name server • Poorly configured DNS servers can lead to bogus entries • Just because a hostname is assigned an IP address or vice-versa, does not mean that the host actually exists • Poor connectivity can pose difficulties to the data collection process

  10. Interesting facts • What has the number of hosts in a certain country to do with its economic status? • More .net hosts than .com hosts – does this mean that there are more hosts for “infrastructure” than for “services”? • The top 2 host names: ~ 1 million www, ~ 400k mail • Canada has about 3.5 million hosts in 21k domains

  11. Conclusions • The “Internet population” is growing at an exponentially rate • Keeping track of the number of hosts in the Internet is important, for several reasons • However, an extremely accurate counting is virtually impossible

  12. References • http://www.isoc.org/internet/history • http://www.isc.org/ds • P. V. Mockapetris, STD0013/RFC1034: Domain names – concepts and facilities • J. Postel, STD0005/RFC0791: Internet Protocol • S. Deering, R. Hinden, RFC2460: Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification

More Related