DIMES is a subproject of the EVERGROW Integrated Project in the EU Information Society Technologies, Future and Emerging Technologies programme.

It is studying the structure and topology of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

to obtain a very accurate map and annotate it with:

• delay loss
• in the future available bandwidth
• link capacity.

Concept and objective

• The DIMES project is based on measurement by software agents that are downloaded by volunteers and installed on their privately owned machines.
• Once installed at user premises the agent operates at a very low rate so as to have minimal impact on the machine performance and on its network connection.
• DIMES follows the Internet dynamics and growth, the project intends to explore possible relationships between the data gathered on the Internet’s growth with geographical and socio-economic data, in particular for fast developing countries, to see if they can provide a measure of economic development and societal openness.
• The project is committed to openness and thus publishes period maps at several aggregation levels on the web. It also includes web interfaces for running remote coordinated measurements, which is used by researches around the world.

As of April 2007, over 12500 agents have been installed by over 5500 users residing in about 95 nations, and in several hundreds of ASes. The project has collected over 2.2 billion measurements. These figures make DIMES the largest Internet topology measurement project in the world.

External links

• The DIMES home page
• Science Magazine: Data-Bots Chart the Internet (Subscription)
• Visualizing Internet Topology at a Macroscopic Scale - CAIDA
• M-PASM (Multiple Perspectives of Autonomous System Mapping )