Research
Ethan Katz-Bassett wins 2025 ACM Internet Measurement Test of Time Award
In 2014, Katz-Bassett and his colleagues proposed a community routing testbed that remains a key resource for Internet measurement research more than a decade later.
Ethan Katz-Bassett, associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia Engineering, and his colleagues have received the 2025 ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) Test of Time Award for their outstanding and enduring work in the field of network measurement. Their 2014 paper “PEERING: An AS for Us” first proposed the PEERING testbed, a system that provides safe and easy access for researchers and educators to the Internet's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing system, a set of rules and policies that determine the network routes for data transmission on the internet.
“This paper introduced a groundbreaking platform that has fundamentally transformed how we study interdomain routing,” said Laurent Vanbever, associate professor of information technology and electrical engineering at ETH Zürich, who endorsed the research for the award. “By enabling safe, controlled BGP experimentation on the live internet, PEERING gave the community unprecedented tools and infrastructure that have enabled over a decade of high-impact research.”
Every year, top computer science conferences recognize research findings previously published that have stood the test of time and continue to shape the field over a decade later. The ACM IMC Test of Time Award is given to papers that have had a significant impact on the field of network measurement since their publication. Katz-Bassett and his colleagues will travel to ACM IMC 2025 in Madison, WI, from October 28-31 to receive their award.
“I'm really honored to receive this award,” said Katz-Bassett. “We had an idea for test infrastructure that we thought would be useful for our own experiments, and it's really gratifying to see that it's been useful for so many other people as well.”
A platform that transformed internet research
When a user browses the internet, BGP is the protocol that determines which path the data takes across the networks between the user and the web server they are accessing. However, BGP suffers from several known issues — for instance, poor performance from suboptimal routing, vulnerabilities such as hijacking and spoofing, and various forms of instability — that contribute to many of the internet’s core challenges.
Previously, research aimed at addressing these issues relied on passive observation of existing routes or simulations. “PEERING: An AS for Us” laid the foundation for a real network on the internet that would allow researchers to control how it exchanged routes and traffic with thousands of networks worldwide. Today, PEERING (Pairing Emulated Experiments with Real Interdomain Network Gateways) enables controlled routing experiments in which researchers can manipulate a variable of interest, while fixing other factors, and measure the outcome.
For example, Vanbever and his colleagues have used PEERING to ethically and safely perform experiments to study BGP hijacking, which is the malicious rerouting of internet traffic that exploits limitations of BGP. Their 2017 paper, “Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies,” demonstrated that traffic to Bitcoin nodes could be intercepted in under 90 seconds – and since then, similar attacks have been observed in the wild. The notable work won the Internet Engineering Task Force/Internet Research Task Force Applied Networking Research Prize in 2019.
Building a global testbed for safer, smarter routing
PEERING’s contribution to the field of network measurement has expanded with the platform’s footprint, enabling impactful, repeatable, and real-world validated measurement science.
“Over time, we've expanded from having connections to just a handful of universities to many commercial networks like Google and Meta, and also to now having routers all over the world,” he said. “You can run experiments that let you tinker with things as if you were a large internet provider.”
Katz-Bassett emphasizes the immense cooperative effort involved in keeping the testbed operational for the benefit of the internet measurement community. The work has stood the test of time due to the efforts of many key individuals, beyond the authors of the paper and including several current and former Columbia affiliates.
He shares the award with paper co-authors Brandon Schlinker, Kyriakos Zarifis, Ítalo Cunha, and Nick Feamster. Cunha is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, who continues to co-lead PEERING with Katz-Bassett. Others involved in the development and maintenance of PEERING include: Vytautas (Valas) Valancius, Ryan Balandran, Ezri Zhu, Leonardo Oliveira Maia, Todd Arnold, and Jiangchen Zhu. The project has been funded in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a joint program by NSF and the Brazilian National Research and Educational Network (RNP), and Google.
“In addition, the testbed really relies on the goodwill and support of the network operations community. Without its support, PEERING couldn't exist,” Katz-Bassett said. “We're giving back to that community by enabling research that hopefully ends up having an impact on improving network operations.”
Lead Photo Caption: Ethan Katz-Bassett, associate professor of electrical engineering
Lead Photo Credit: Paul Elledge