Zachary Bischof to Present Research at 2015 Internet Measurement Conference

EECS Ph.D. Student Zachary Bischof of AquaLab will be presenting research from his paper, titled, "In and Out of Cuba: Characterizing Cuba's Connectivity" at the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), held in Tokyo, Japan on October 28-30, 2015.

The paper's coauthors, including EECS Ph.D. Student John Rula and Prof. Fabián Bustamante (also of AquaLab), have started to characterize the state of Cuba’s access to the wider Internet. Their first paper on the topic reports on some of their early findings, including high RTTs to websites hosted off the island, even after the addition of ALBA- 1, a high degree of path asymmetry in traffic to/from the island that partially traverse high-latency satellite links, and several web services that return invalid responses to requests originating from the island. They plan to continually make a periodic status reports on the state of the Internet in Cuba and publish the associated data available to the research community.

Paper Abstract: The goal of our work is to characterize the current state of Cuba's access to the wider Internet. This work is motivated by recent improvements in connectivity to the island and the growing commercial interest following the ease of restrictions on travel and trade with the US. In this paper, we profile Cuba’s networks, their connections to the rest of the world, and the routes of international traffic going to and from the island. Despite the addition of the ALBA-1 submarine cable, we find that round trip times to websites hosted off the island remain very high; pings to popular websites frequently took over 300 ms. We also find a high degree of path asymmetry in traffic to/from Cuba. Specifically, in our analysis we find that traffic going out of Cuba typically travels through the ALBA-1 cable, but, surprisingly, traffic on the reverse path often traverses high-latency satellite links, adding over 200 ms to round trip times. Last, we analyze queries to public DNS servers and SSL certificate requests to characterize the availability of network services in Cuba.

The 2015 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) is a three-day event focusing on Internet measuement and analysis. The conference is sponsored jointly by ACM SIGCOMM and ACM SIGMETRICS. IMC 2015 is the 15th in a series of highly successful Internet Measurement Workshops and Conferences.