Introducing the COMMONS Project

by Sascha Meinrath

The United States is facing a worsening broadband crisis -- over the past half-decade, the US has fallen behind a growing list of industrialized nations in delivery speeds, price per megabit, broadband penetration rates, and other facets of broadband service provision. Rural and poor communities are being doubly discriminated against -- often receiving little or no broadband access and being forced to pay higher service rates when they do have access.

On December 12-13, 2006, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) held a workshop to discuss and ultimately propose a collaboration among researchers and networks to simultaneously solve three growing problems facing the Internet:

• A self-reported financial crisis in the Internet infrastructure provider industry that poses a severe threat to broadband growth and U.S. competitiveness
• A data acquisition crisis, which has deeply stunted the field of network science
• A dilemma within emerging community, municipal, regional, and state networks, who need (additional) broadband connectivity but face severely limited provider, service level, and usage options

The Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (COMMONS) initiative proposes to partner with a collaborative national backbone to connect participating community, municipal, regional, and state networks to one another and to the global Internet. COMMONS Peering will be conditionally available to city, county, state, and federal government entities, academic institutions, community Internet initiatives (e.g., community wireless networks), and commercial entities based upon the following three conditions:

1. Networks will make select operational data available to COMMONS researchers (under appropriate legal data sharing and privacy guards)
2. The attached networks must agree to develop and abide by COMMONS policies which will be based upon research results of empirical data analyses of network usage
3. Participating networks must abide by the Acceptable Use Policies set by the COMMONS project coordination committee.

This "COMMONS Strategy Workshop" brought together representatives from industry, community and municipal networks, regional and state networks, as well as Internet researchers, community organizers, and developers building next-generation data. Workshop attendees discussed the design, creation, and operation of an experimental infrastructure that could simultaneously address three core crises: the digital divide, scientific integrity of network research, and inability to empirically inform policy decisions at a critical juncture in telecommunications history.

While the COMMONS Project will broadly impact the Internet industry, both commercial and non-profit, as well as policymaking, by providing substantial real-world data on Internet traffic at the national level and informing analyses, regulatory discussion, and technological innovation, it also promises to raise the intellectual merit of the entire field of Internet science through increased standards of data collection, curating, and sharing in the research community.

COMMONS provides an opportunity to address shortcomings within a single national initiative. By creating a national peering infrastructure that interested network operators can choose to join, COMMONS will provide numerous opportunities and benefits for a range of different constituencies. However, there are also myriad potential obstacles and difficulties, which the purpose of this workshop was to articulate and analyze.

The workshop addressed seven key areas identified by workshop participants as critical to the initiative:

• Infrastructure issues
• Regulatory harmonization and reform
• Outreach and education
• Research and technological development
• Business model innovation
• Expansion of broadband services
• Vision for the future

For participating networks, the incentive to join COMMONS is similar to that of participants of Internet2, NLR, Quilt, and 33 state networks trying to execute similar agenda on a smaller scale: collective buying power, ongoing access to extensive research data, affordable fiber infrastructure, and transparent and accountable collaboration. As a scientific and public-service hybrid, COMMONS is a multi-faceted R&D endeavor that will allow measurable progress on many issues of the Internet as emerging critical cyberinfrastructure.

Taken together, participants in the COMMONS Project envision a collaborative community research environment that will truly expand our horizons into the 21st century and beyond.

(Note: This article is part of a larger blog, posted by Sascha Meinrath, which you can find in its entirety at http://www.saschameinrath.com/2007feb15commons_strategy_workshop_final_r...)