My Project
My Project is working with an application called CIMAP, which stands for Customized Internet Mapping and Picturing. CIMAP was originally created by Karim Mattar, who was an undergraduate research assistant at UMass. His original version, NVT, can be viewed here. Jane, another CRA participant working with Professor Gao, and I are trying to improve the application as well as make it available for public use on the web. The new version we have created can be viewed here.

What CIMAP does is allow network operators to visualize Bgp routing information, AS relationships and AS connectivity. I had no idea what any of that meant when I first got here, but now I have a pretty good idea. So if you don't understand either, the following is a more detailed explaination.

On the Internet, an autonomous system (AS) is either a single network or a group of networks that is controlled by a common network administrator (or group of administrators) on behalf of a single administrative entity (such as a university, a business enterprise, or a business division). Each AS is assigned a globally unique number (for example, Trinity College is AS3592) and has a list of IP addresses that belong to it. If an AS is a customer of another AS, then it announces its IP addresses to its provider; if an AS is a backbone provider (thus has only customers, no providers) then it announces its IP addresses to everyone. This way, everyone computer connected to the internet can find any other computer on the internet. This is the basic structure of the internet and why it works.

An autonomous system shares routing information with other autonomous systems using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). A BGP table contains information about paths that exist from one AS to other ASes and a relationship file contains information about the type of relationship that exist between two ASes, which are customer-provider, provider-customer, peer-peer, and sibling-sibling. Using the information from a BGP table and a relationship file, CIMAP can visualize all the paths that exist from a source to an AS, or from an AS to its neighbors.

Our goal, is to make this application available for download and use by the public, as well as creating an applet version that can be used on the web. In order to accomplish this, we'll also need to reconfigure the program to use a database to store the information in the BGP table and relationship file.