News 

The researchers from the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University argue that millions of internet users logging into applications like BitTorrent or Skype naturally generate data traffic that inherently provides information about whether the network is working or not. By sharing high-level information about their experience, these users could very efficiently and accurately detect where problems occur in real time.

To exploit this the scientists

ADVERTISEMENT

have created the Network Early Warning System (NEWS) to offer and "overall monitoring system" for the internet. The scheme is the brainchild of Fabian Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and doctoral student David Choffnes.

"You can think of it as crowd sourcing network monitoring," said Bustamante.

By gathering information about network conditions from natural data traffic, NEWS focuses only on problems that affect end users and does so without requiring any additional network-measurement traffic. NEWS incorporates knowledge of "normal" behaviour for network applications to prevent false alarms and confirms suspected problems by checking with other nearby users.

The system is currently implemented as an extension to a popular BitTorrent client. By generating warnings about problems in the network, the software allows users to ensure that they get the internet service for which they pay. This was incentive enough for more than 12,000 users to install the software during its beta-testing phase.