End-to-End behavior of the internet: Measurements, analysis, and applications

Abstract

From a connection's point of view, the best effort service provided by the current Internet amounts in practice to offering a channel with time-varying characteristics such as delay or loss rate. Clearly, the efficient use of network resources is possible only if the characteristics of communication channels as well as the impact of such characteristics on network and application performance can be estimated accurately. We introduce two approaches to carry out such estimation. The black box approach uses techniques from time series analysis. The specific approach uses techniques from queueing analysis. We present results which can be obtained with each approach and identify problems which have not yet been either considered or solved in a satisfactory manner.