Network outages can have a big impact on businesses that rely on the Internet (which is just about every business these days), but sometimes cable breaks or other problems can be hard to quickly isolate so they can be repaired. So researchers at Northwestern University set up a new system that borrows a page from brick-and-mortar neighborhood-watch programs to keep an eye out for network problems.
The researchers have asked users across the Internet to download a piece of software that looks for performance abnormalities on local networks and reports them back to a central repository. That allows an Internet-service company to look in on the system — called the Network Early Warning System, or NEWS — and detect any unusual concentrations of network-traffic problems that might indicate an area of the network that needs repair.
The system uses BitTorrent, a popular method for peer-to-peer file trading that many students use to trade music and movie files. The software tool is free, but requires users to first download a BitTorrent client called Vuze.
“Peer-to-peer systems are growing organically with the Internet, and so they provide a good foothold to monitor the Internet,” said Fabián E. Bustamante, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern who helped build the system, in an interview on Monday.
The researchers plan to release a free software tool next week that will make it easy to monitor trouble spots reported by the new detection system, with the hope that major Internet-service companies will use the system to improve their service. —Jeffrey R. Young
