Samara University developing a unique chronometer for the Internet

07 October 2020

A postgraduate student from Syria Samara Mayhub, thanks to a grant from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, will be able to do conduct research at Samara University. Her work is dedicated to the creation of specialized software systems for detecting network anomalies of the Internet and preventing hacker attacks, the press service of the university said on Tuesday.

Mayhub graduated with a bachelor’s degree at a local university, after which the university sent her to continue her education in Russia. She studied for three years in Moscow — first a year at the preparatory faculty, where she studied Russian, then she has got a master’s degree. Then she received a quota for postgraduate studies and chose Samara University. Samara Mayhub’s project “Collecting and analyzing data on the quality of network connections” won the contest for the best projects of fundamental scientific research carried out by young scientists studying in graduate school, and received grant support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR).

“The word ‘Samara’ in Arabic means ‘dark girl’. In Syria, many girls are called Samara, this is a very common female name in our country. When I came to Russia, I did not know at all that there was such a city here — with my name. When I found out, I was, so to speak, a bit shocked. Therefore, perhaps, it is fate after all that I came here to study. This is a very beautiful city,” the press service quoted the graduate student as saying.

One of the goals of her project will be to create a special utility program to measure the one-way delay of packets transmitted between nodes in the network from computer to computer. Thanks to the measurements carried out, this program will allow to more accurately analyze the quality of network connections, identify network bandwidth problems, find Internet bottlenecks, and solve network security problems.

The accuracy of delay measurements will be increased due to a new method of time stamping packets: they will be placed exactly at the time of their sending and receiving due to a single high-precision synchronization of network nodes. In addition, software timestamps will be used, and not hardware, as was done earlier with such measurements, which will significantly simplify the requirements for the power of the measuring equipment.

For experiments, which will be conducted both in local and global networks, the NetTestBox hardware systems, previously developed by scientists from Samara University, will be used, which are Raspberry PI mini-computers with a highly sensitive receiver of signals from global positioning systems — GLONASS, GPS, BeiDou and Galileo. The signals from the satellites are synchronized by the software server of the exact time with an accuracy of a few microseconds.

 

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