Screenshot of the traffic loss at Ams-Ix, Aug 29th 2010

Researchers have traditionally shared information about their ongoing work via mailing lists, conferences and publications in journals and at conferences. Recently, some researchers have started their own blog where they post reflections, discuss about research fundings or ongoing projects. Here are a few blogs maintained by networking researchers or operators that a networking researcher may find useful :

Networking researchers

• SIGCOMM's official blog
• Nick Feamster's blog
  

BEgrid is the Belgian research grid infrastructure that resulted from a BELNET initiative in 2003. BEgrid is built using resources from universities and research centers (UCL, KUL, ULB, VUB, UGent, Universiteit Antwerpen…) and the BELNET high-speed network. The organization provides resources for researchers at both national level and international level (like the LHC high-energy physics experiments from CERN). BELNET as NGI (National GRID Initiative) provides central services and represents Belgium in international organizations (like EGI - European Grid Initiative).

A good researcher, young or old, must stay informed about the progress of his/her field. In the 20th century, the library was the researcher's best friend to stay informed. Most researchers spent some time regularly in the library to browse the table of contents of the new magazines and journals. Some companies even published special journals that contained abstracts of papers published in key journals. Current Contents was one of these journals.

Internet Topology Discovery Using mrinfo

The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP - RFC1112) was initially designed to allow hosts to report their active multicast groups to the multicast router on their LAN. However, IGMP also provides some management tools such as the messages used by mrinfo. In practice, an mrinfo reply provides similar information as a show command on the router's command line interface. Therefore, mrinfo allows us to silently collect useful topological information.

The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) is a proposal aiming at resolving some problem the Internet is facing today like the lack of inbound inter-domain traffic engineering or the continuous growth of the routing table.

The tutorials available on http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/tutorials/lisp-tutorial present LISP today