Vern E. Paxson

EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-97-945
June 1997

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1997/CSD-97-945.pdf

One of the fundamental difficulties with trying to characterize the Internet's behavior lies in its immense diversity. To date, efforts to characterize end-to-end Internet dynamics such as packet delay and loss have studied at most a handful of traffic traces and Internet paths, making it difficult to assess the generality of the findings. Yet solid assessments of Internet path properties are crucial for engineering transport protocols for high performance. In this work, we attempt to tackle this problem using a distributed framework we developed for conducting end-to-end measurements. In the first part, we report on an end-to-end routing study conducted using the framework, in which 37 sites participated, yielding about 40,000 routing measurements along 1,000 Internet paths. We characterize routing pathologies and failures, stability over time, and symmetry. In the second part of the study, we analyze 20,000 TCP bulk transfers measured using the same framework. We discuss: 1) errors introduced by the packet filters used to make the measurements; 2) dealing with unsynchronized and skewed clocks; 3) separating out TCP behavior from network behavior; 4) the surprisingly large variations between different TCP implementations; 5) pathological network behavior, such as out-of-order delivery, replication, and corruption; 6) a robust algorithm for estimating bottleneck bandwidth; and 7) the resulting characterizations of Internet packet loss and delay, including general assessments of queueing time scales and available bandwidth.

Advisor: Domenico Ferrari

BibTeX citation:

@phdthesis{Paxson:CSD-97-945,
    Author = {Paxson, Vern E.},
    Title = {Measurements and Analysis of End-to-End Internet Dynamics},
    School = {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year = {1997},
    Month = {Jun},
    URL = {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1997/5498.html},
    Number = {UCB/CSD-97-945},
    Abstract = {One of the fundamental difficulties with trying to characterize the Internet's behavior lies in its immense diversity.  To date, efforts to characterize end-to-end Internet dynamics such as packet delay and loss have studied at most a handful of traffic traces and Internet paths, making it difficult to assess the generality of the findings.  Yet solid assessments of Internet path properties are crucial for engineering transport protocols for high performance. In this work, we attempt to tackle this problem using a distributed framework we developed for conducting end-to-end measurements. In the first part, we report on an end-to-end routing study conducted using the framework, in which 37 sites participated, yielding about 40,000 routing measurements along 1,000 Internet paths.  We characterize routing pathologies and failures, stability over time, and symmetry.  In the second part of the study, we analyze 20,000 TCP bulk transfers measured using the same framework. We discuss:  1) errors introduced by the packet filters used to make the measurements;  2) dealing with unsynchronized and skewed clocks;  3) separating out TCP behavior from network behavior;  4) the surprisingly large variations between different TCP implementations;  5) pathological network behavior, such as out-of-order delivery, replication, and corruption;  6) a robust algorithm for estimating bottleneck bandwidth; and 7) the resulting characterizations of Internet packet loss and delay, including general assessments of queueing time scales and available bandwidth.}
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Thesis
%A Paxson, Vern E.
%T Measurements and Analysis of End-to-End Internet Dynamics
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 1997
%@ UCB/CSD-97-945
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1997/5498.html
%F Paxson:CSD-97-945