Download or read book Understanding and Mitigating Risks to Internet Infrastructure from Climate Change written by Scott Anderson (Ph.D.) and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change poses diverse and significant risks to critical infrastructure, e.g., transportation networks, the energy sector, manufacturing, water systems, and communications systems. The focus of the research reported in this dissertation is to improve understanding of the risks of climate change-related threats to physical Internet infrastructure toward the goal of reducing their potential impact. We conducted four studies unified by the employment of geospatial analysis to understand and quantify various risks to Internet infrastructure. First, we conducted an assessment of the impact of wildfires on cellular infrastructure in the US. We used the geographic features in multiple datasets to assess the spatial overlap between historical wildfires and cellular infrastructure and to analyze current infrastructure vulnerability. We found that the primary risk to cellular communication is power outage rather than cellular equipment damage. We identified California, Florida, and Texas as the states with the most cellular infrastructure at risk from wildfires. Second, we conducted an active measurement study of how power outages affect end host Internet service availability. We built a system, PowerPing, that monitors a power outage reporting website (poweroutage.us) and measures end host responsiveness in the affected areas. We used PowerPing to collect power outage and end host responsiveness data over one year from June 2020 through July 2021. Our study suggests that improving backup power for network devices in both the home as well as at the ISP may improve end host connectivity during typical power outages. We next developed an open-source toolkit, the Internet Geographic Database (iGDB), to connect physical and logical topological views of the Internet with the goal of providing a utility for the community to understand Internet outage risks. We began by building a representation of physical connectivity using online sources to identify locations that house Internet transport hardware (i.e., PoPs, colocation centers, IXPs, etc.), and approximated locations of links between these based on shortest-path rights-of-way. We then used standard data sources for generating maps of IP-level and AS-level logical connectivity, and grafted these onto physical maps using geographic anchors. Finally, we conducted a quantitative assessment of the improved coverage area if existing fiber optic Internet cables were used to detect low-magnitude ground motion events in smart cities. We quantified and described the spatial attributes of the added coverage area of sensors placed along fiber optic cable for the 100 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States. All four of these studies take a geospatial approach to analyze and quantify exogenous risks to Internet communication systems.