Assignment 1
Michalis Faloutsos CS 240 2012     -------     Due date: May 4th by 5pm

Measure the path stability from your machine to at least 3 points in the Internet.
The overarching question: How stable is Internet routing?
In terms of paths at router level
In terms of paths at AS level
In terms of delay
The requirements are:
a.  to measure, provide statistics and show plots over time
b. Identify  distributions: X% of time the path is <20ms and
characterize the behavior (periodic, bursty, use SELFIS, Matlab etc)
c. Identify anomalies and pathological situations

Expectations and Evaluation: 
Scope: 4-5 pages doublecolumn 11pt font, 
    It should follow the structure of a report: Intro, Data collection, Observations, Discussion

This is an open assignment: I would like you to think what will make the assignment interesting. This is why the questions are not set, but there are more general researchy questions.

a. Data collection (possibly scripts may be a good idea: shell scripts, python, perl etc)
    You should collect your own data, and if you want, you can use other datasets
b. Data processing (usually in measurements things can go bad)
    This can be something you write or tools you use (matlab, excell, etc)
c. Data plotting (the point here is visual clarity and choice of what is shown)

50% on providing basic answers to the above.
20% for creativity: asking interesting questions, using interesting tools etc
10% for identifying interesting results
        (ie reporting that average delay is 25ms is one thing,
             bur reporting that 5% of the time the delay was above 300ms is more interesting, though bases on the same collected data)
10% discussion on what it means what are the implications
       (e.g. be careful in how you generalize your observations or what they mean, the related reading below can help frame them)
10% writeup quality

Recommended reading to provide context for your analysis. Note that they are very old so you may want to look for newer works in these areas

A classic paper by Paxson:
End-to-End Routing Behavior in the Internet, Vern Paxson, ACM SIGCOMM 1996

A "follow up paper" by Siganos et al on BGP routing:
"BGP Routing Properties at a Large Time Scale"  G. Siganos, M. Faloutsos  Global Internet Symposium, Taipei, Taiwan, November 17-21, 2002

 BGP routing dynamics revisited.
Jun Li, Michael Guidero, Zhen Wu, Eric Purpus, Toby Ehrenkranz,
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 37(2): 5-16 (2007)