Since the NSFnet program was initiated about ten years ago, the Internet has become an increasingly key enabling technology for the research and education missions of the R&E community around the world. During these years, however, the Internet has grown in complexity to the point where even well-informed Internet users and engineers have a somewhat fuzzy understanding of the topology of the Internet, of the paths taken by their data from one Internet site to another, and of the reliability and performance of those paths.

Thus, while the Internet has grown in performance and reliability, the user's understanding of that performance and reliability has declined.

Advanced Network & Services and the participating organizations are addressing some of the key negative consequences of this complexity. The program aims to enable the R&E community generally, and the participating organizations specifically, to address their Internet performance issues with relevant data and evolve new approaches towards solving them.

Surveyor is a measurement infrastructure that is being currently deployed at participating sites around the world. Based on standards work being done in the IETF's IPPM WG, Surveyor measures the performance of the Internet paths among participating organizations. The project is also developing methodologies and tools to analyze the performance data.

The project aims to create the infrastructure and tools that will improve the ability to understand and effectively engineer the Internet infrastructure.