Internet Research Needs Better Models

Papers

• Internet Research Needs Better Models (postscript, PDF).
  Sally Floyd and Eddie Kohler.
  Hotnets-I. October 2002.
  Simulation scripts.

• Measuring the Evolution of Transport Protocols in the Internet (postscript, PDF).
  Alberto Medina, Mark Allman, and Sally Floyd.
  CCR, pp. 37-52, April 2005.

• Modeling Wireless Links for Transport Protocols,
  A. Gurtov, and S. Floyd
  ACM CCR, 34(2):85-96, April 2004.
  Simulation scripts, available under tcl/ex/wireless-scripts in the ns-2 distribution.
  Also: A. Gurtov, NS2 Simulation Tests for Modeling Wireless Links, December 2003.

• MultiQ: Automated Detection of Multiple Bottleneck Capacities Along a Path ( PDF),
  Sachin Katti, Dina Katabi, Charles Blake, Eddie Kohler, and Jacob Strauss,
  ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference '04, October 2004.

• M&M: A Passive Toolkit for Measuring, Correlating, and Tracking Path Characteristics ( PDF),
  Sachin Katti, Dina Katabi, Eddie Kohler, and Jacob Strauss,
  MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory technical report MIT-CSAIL-TR-945, April 2004.

Why Models Matter :

The Transport Models Research Group :

Tools for Building Better Models:

• Web page on Building Models for Aggregate Traffic on Congested Links.

• Measurement Studies of End-to-End Congestion Control in the Internet .

• Network Simulators.

• Topology Modeling.

• Traffic Generation.

• Assorted tools for measuring aggregate and available bandwidth, and for characterizing congested links.

• Modeling Wireless Links.

• Other citations on modeling, models for mobility.

Proposals and Projects:

• Sally Floyd and Eddie Kohler, Measurements, Models, and Simulation Scenarios for Internet Research, NSF project, June 2002.
  "This project proposes to build a much richer understanding of the range of realistic models, and of the likely relevance of different model parameters to network performance. ... We will build on the wealth of existing measurement results, generating new empirical results where needed. We propose to create high-quality tools to facilitate ongoing measurement by ourselves and the wider network research community, so that our results keep up with the Internet's high rate of change."

• kc claffy et al., Correlating Heterogeneous Measurement Data to Achieve System-Level Analysis of Internet Traffic Trends, NSF Project, August 2001.
  "Our proposal takes advantage of and integrates existing NSF-sponsored technologies and tools to 1) more strategically instrument the Internet to capture real data of interest to both traffic engineers and Internet modelers, 2) create distributed repositories of experimentally derived traffic trend parameters while enabling access to heterogeneous network measurements, and 3) develop meaningful and timely analysis tools and reports."
• CAIDA's Network Modeling and Simulation Project.
  "This project involves development of tools, collection of data, and performance of analyses aimed at supporting the network modeling and simulation communities."
• John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin, Ramesh Govindan, and Ashish Goel, Simulation Augmented by Measurement and Analysis for Networks (SAMAN), DARPA project.
  This project includes: "extending current network simulation tools such as ns-2 with: ... application-level traffic models, tools to rapidly use measurements to parameterize traffic models." Output includes RAMP, a tool for modeling web and ftp traffic from trace files, and for characterizing the rtts and bottleneck bandwidth of the measured traffic.

• Boleslaw Szymanski, Christopher Carothers, Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, and Biplab Sikdar, Scalable Online Network Modelling and Simulation, DARPA-funded project, 2000.
  "The main objective of this project is to advance fundamentally network modeling and simulation and network experiment design to enable automated network management and control."

Workshops:

• Workshop on Models, Methods and Tools for Reproducible Network Research (MoMeTools), August 2003, In conjunction with ACM SIGCOMM 2003.
  "The goal of this workshop is to critically assess the current models, methods and tools of network research for identifying shortcomings of the state-of-the-art, and to discuss approaches for improvements and innovation."

Archives:

• The earlier, July 2002 draft of Internet Research Needs Better Models (postscript, PDF).