Jeremy Kepner

Global usage of the Internet is expected to exceed 5 billion people. Accordingly, the Internet is a domain as worthy of scientific exploration as land, sea, air, and space. Deepening our scientific understanding of the Internet is expected to yield correspondingly equivalent societal benefits. Observationally, the Internet can be viewed as billions (heading towards trillions) of variable brightness sources with many natural analogues in astronomy and astrophysics. This talk explores these analogues which include network traffic matrices (‘celestial sphere’), dedicated network traffic collection sites (‘observatories’), specialized network taps (‘telescopes’), finely calibrated high-speed traffic analyzers (‘detectors’), spectral characterization of aggregated traffic (‘background radiation’), aggregate cross-correlation analysis (‘large scale structure’), and identification of regular broad-spectrum emitters (‘pulsars’). Understanding of the underlying processes in any field is discovered by painstaking science. Early efforts on small network data sets revealed significant new discoveries and established the field of Network Science. Current observations are a million times larger and are calling out for scientific exploration. More pragmatically, effective utilization of the Internet requires a detailed understanding of its principal characteristic: network traffic.