Dear RIPE Community,

My name is Shihan Lin, a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at Duke University. My colleagues and I are working on an Internet research project led by Prof. Xiaowei Yang, and we are using RIPE Atlas probes in our research project.  However, we face a credit shortage in our account, so we are writing to humbly request your consideration of a potential credit donation to support our ongoing research efforts.

Our research project aims to improve cloud routing. We first need to measure the existing cloud routing performance, so we need to send traceroutes and pings from probes around the world to VMs in multiple regions of three commercial cloud providers. With traceroute results, we can detect clouds’ Points of Presence (PoPs) used by probes to reach the VMs. By discovering the PoPs of a cloud, we can discover alternative paths by selecting different PoPs to enter the cloud and thus improve the routing latency. We finished a part of such measurements and discovered some better alternative paths. However, we need another round of measurement to verify our findings. Specifically, we need to send repeated pings from probes to alternative PoPs to validate that such PoPs consistently offer lower latency. 

According to our calculation, we need about 50M credits for our remaining measurement.  Thus we are wondering whether we could ask for some donations from the RIPE community. We greatly appreciate any assistance you can offer. If it is possible, you can donate it to my RIPE Atlas account LSHZY137 at gmail.com.

Thank you very much for your help and great generosity!  Our research will be submitted to a networking conference (SIGCOMM, NSDI, or IMC) to share the knowledge with the public.

Many Thanks,

Shihan Lin