- Email: [email protected]
Special Issue: Performance Evaluation of IP Networks and Services
Computer Communications 26 (2003) 783–784 www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom
Guest Editorial
Special Issue: Performance Evaluation of IP Networks and Services
The last decade has been a very exciting time for the performance evaluation community. Long accepted truths of independence and Poisson arrival processes gave way to a new view of long-range dependence everywhere. An entirely new application—the World Wide Web—emerged and quickly became the predominant traffic source on the Internet. With the Web came new problems to be solved in the areas of platforms, programming languages, and communications protocols. The last decade saw link speeds increase from 10 to 100 and 1000 Mbps in the local area. In the wide area, backbone data rates have grown from OC-12 to OC-192. The ATM protocol that was expected to become the common end-to-end solution gave way to IP as the universal transport. Today it is ‘IP everywhere and over everything’. Performance evaluation continues to play a key role in the advancing of communications technologies and, in particular, of IP networks and IP-based services. IP networks and services are growing in number and variety. Performance modeling and measurement in both laboratory and live networks is being used to optimize capacity and resource trade-offs. Striking a balance between offering sufficient resources and limiting capital investments is essential for providing appropriate and economical connectivity and services. While a number of interesting concepts in traffic and congestion control have been proposed (and some are about to be implemented in commercial networks), many issues have only been addressed at the surface level, or even not at all. The area of differentiated services, including QoS mechanisms, QoS routing, and MPLS traffic engineering, is still a field with more open questions than answers. The Web continues to change— currently towards dynamic content delivery—and with these changes come many open performance questions. Even ‘old’ problems, such as congestion control and TCP performance continue to bring new questions and answers to the table. This special issue of Computer Communications addresses some of these ‘hot topics’ in performance evaluation of IP networks and services with 10 high-quality papers. Not only are the topics ‘hot’, but this special issue is as well. Over 50 papers were received in response to an open call! It is due to size limits that many hard decisions had to be made to reduce the number of papers to 10. This special issue starts off with two papers that deal with modeling: In A New Method for Analyzing Feedback-Based
Protocols with Applications to Engineering Web Traffic over the Internet, Dan P. Heyman et al. develop an analytic method for analyzing feedback-based flow and congestion control protocols where the offered load is Web-user like, i.e. users alternate between initiating file transfers and thinking (being idle). In Pragmatic Modeling of Broadband Access Traffic, Matthew Roughan and Charles Kalmanek propose to use coarse SNMP measurements, which are more ubiquitously available than fine-grained packet traces, for capturing the most important features of broadband access traffic. The next two papers deal with routing: In Performance Evaluation of QoS Routing Methods for IPBased Multiservice Networks, Gerald R. Ash describes QoS routing methods and presents performance analysis models that illustrate the tradeoffs between the various approaches. In NetLets: Measurement-Based Routing Daemons for Low End-to-End Delays over Networks, Nageswara S.V. Rao et al. describe the framework of NetLets to enable Internet applications to send data with end-to-end delay guarantees by measuring the effective bandwidth and propagation delays of links and computing paths with minimum measured end-to-end delays for packets of various sizes. On a related topic, the paper entitled Quality of Service Provisioning through Traffic Engineering with Applicability to IP-based Production Networks, by Panos Trimintzios et al. develops a traffic engineering and control system for transporting video and audio production network traffic over IP networks and employs simulations to demonstrate that the demanding QoS objectives can be met. The remaining papers in this special issue focus on measurement and monitoring related topics. The paper entitled On Detecting Service Violations and Bandwidth Theft in QoS Network Domains, by Ahsan Habibet al. proposes a distributed network edge-to-edge monitoring approach using measurement agents to collect information on delays, losses, throughput, SLA violations, bandwidth theft and denial of service attacks. In Evaluating Web User Perceived Latency Using Server Side Measurements, Marik Marshak and Hanoch Levy present a new approach to estimate Web user perceived latency based on server side measurements utilizing an HTTP object (sentry). Yet another paper deals with user-perception: In Performance Comparison of Dynamic Web Platforms, Varsha Apte et al. compare four dynamic Web programming technologies in
0140-3664/03/$ - see front matter q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 4 0 - 3 6 6 4 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 2 1 3 - X
784
F. Huebner, K. Christensen / Computer Communications 26 (2003) 783–784
regard to the resulting performance by means of testing and measurements. The two final papers deal with traffic characterizations: In TCP’s Role in the Propagation of Self-Similarity in the Internet, Andras Veres et al. demonstrate that TCP’s congestion control algorithm, which adapts to self-similar fluctuations over several time scales, is the cause for the propagation of self-similarity in the Internet. In Observed Performance of Elastic Internet Applications, Joachim Charzinski analyzes HTTP, SMTP and POP3 traffic traces in regard to statistics about elements in Web pages, number of e-mails in an SMTP connection, number of parallel connections, download delays, and so on. We would like to give a very big thanks to the reviewers for this special issue and to the many researchers who contributed papers. We hope that you the reader find this special issue to be valuable and useful. We very much enjoyed putting together this special issue. Frank Huebner received his M.S. degree in C.S. in 1989 from University of Erlangen/ Nurenberg, Germany and his PhD degree in C.S. in 1994 from University of Wuerzburg, Germany. After working for Telstra, Bellcore (now Telcordia) and AT&T Labs, he joined the AT&T/BT Global Venture Concert. He returned to AT&T Labs in spring of 2002, where he currently manages the Managed Services Validation department. His research interests include IP traffic modeling, performance analysis and congestion control. Frank is on the editorial boards for Computer Communications and Telecommunication Systems. He is co-chairman of SPIE’s ITCOM Internet, Performance & Control of Network Systems conference and serves on the organizing committee of the IEEE Local Computer Networks conference.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1-813-974-4761; fax: þ 1-813-974-5456.
Ken Christensen received his PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University in 1991. He is an Associate Professor at the University of South Florida where his main research interest is in high-speed switch architectures. Ken is on the editorial boards for Computer Communications and the International Journal of Network Management, and is a subject area editor for IEEE ITPro magazine. Ken is on the organizing committee for the IEEE Local Computer Networks conference. Ken is a member of ACM and ASEE, a senior member of IEEE, and a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of Florida. His homepage is at http://www.csee.usf.edu/~christen.
F. Huebner AT&T Labs, Room MT-D5-2C05, 200 Laurel Avenue, Middletown, NJ 07748, USA E-mail address: [email protected] K. Christensen* Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, ENB 118, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA E-mail address: [email protected] Received 7 August 2002; Accepted 7 August 2002
Guest Editorial
Special Issue: Performance Evaluation of IP Networks and Services
The last decade has been a very exciting time for the performance evaluation community. Long accepted truths of independence and Poisson arrival processes gave way to a new view of long-range dependence everywhere. An entirely new application—the World Wide Web—emerged and quickly became the predominant traffic source on the Internet. With the Web came new problems to be solved in the areas of platforms, programming languages, and communications protocols. The last decade saw link speeds increase from 10 to 100 and 1000 Mbps in the local area. In the wide area, backbone data rates have grown from OC-12 to OC-192. The ATM protocol that was expected to become the common end-to-end solution gave way to IP as the universal transport. Today it is ‘IP everywhere and over everything’. Performance evaluation continues to play a key role in the advancing of communications technologies and, in particular, of IP networks and IP-based services. IP networks and services are growing in number and variety. Performance modeling and measurement in both laboratory and live networks is being used to optimize capacity and resource trade-offs. Striking a balance between offering sufficient resources and limiting capital investments is essential for providing appropriate and economical connectivity and services. While a number of interesting concepts in traffic and congestion control have been proposed (and some are about to be implemented in commercial networks), many issues have only been addressed at the surface level, or even not at all. The area of differentiated services, including QoS mechanisms, QoS routing, and MPLS traffic engineering, is still a field with more open questions than answers. The Web continues to change— currently towards dynamic content delivery—and with these changes come many open performance questions. Even ‘old’ problems, such as congestion control and TCP performance continue to bring new questions and answers to the table. This special issue of Computer Communications addresses some of these ‘hot topics’ in performance evaluation of IP networks and services with 10 high-quality papers. Not only are the topics ‘hot’, but this special issue is as well. Over 50 papers were received in response to an open call! It is due to size limits that many hard decisions had to be made to reduce the number of papers to 10. This special issue starts off with two papers that deal with modeling: In A New Method for Analyzing Feedback-Based
Protocols with Applications to Engineering Web Traffic over the Internet, Dan P. Heyman et al. develop an analytic method for analyzing feedback-based flow and congestion control protocols where the offered load is Web-user like, i.e. users alternate between initiating file transfers and thinking (being idle). In Pragmatic Modeling of Broadband Access Traffic, Matthew Roughan and Charles Kalmanek propose to use coarse SNMP measurements, which are more ubiquitously available than fine-grained packet traces, for capturing the most important features of broadband access traffic. The next two papers deal with routing: In Performance Evaluation of QoS Routing Methods for IPBased Multiservice Networks, Gerald R. Ash describes QoS routing methods and presents performance analysis models that illustrate the tradeoffs between the various approaches. In NetLets: Measurement-Based Routing Daemons for Low End-to-End Delays over Networks, Nageswara S.V. Rao et al. describe the framework of NetLets to enable Internet applications to send data with end-to-end delay guarantees by measuring the effective bandwidth and propagation delays of links and computing paths with minimum measured end-to-end delays for packets of various sizes. On a related topic, the paper entitled Quality of Service Provisioning through Traffic Engineering with Applicability to IP-based Production Networks, by Panos Trimintzios et al. develops a traffic engineering and control system for transporting video and audio production network traffic over IP networks and employs simulations to demonstrate that the demanding QoS objectives can be met. The remaining papers in this special issue focus on measurement and monitoring related topics. The paper entitled On Detecting Service Violations and Bandwidth Theft in QoS Network Domains, by Ahsan Habibet al. proposes a distributed network edge-to-edge monitoring approach using measurement agents to collect information on delays, losses, throughput, SLA violations, bandwidth theft and denial of service attacks. In Evaluating Web User Perceived Latency Using Server Side Measurements, Marik Marshak and Hanoch Levy present a new approach to estimate Web user perceived latency based on server side measurements utilizing an HTTP object (sentry). Yet another paper deals with user-perception: In Performance Comparison of Dynamic Web Platforms, Varsha Apte et al. compare four dynamic Web programming technologies in
0140-3664/03/$ - see front matter q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 4 0 - 3 6 6 4 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 2 1 3 - X
784
F. Huebner, K. Christensen / Computer Communications 26 (2003) 783–784
regard to the resulting performance by means of testing and measurements. The two final papers deal with traffic characterizations: In TCP’s Role in the Propagation of Self-Similarity in the Internet, Andras Veres et al. demonstrate that TCP’s congestion control algorithm, which adapts to self-similar fluctuations over several time scales, is the cause for the propagation of self-similarity in the Internet. In Observed Performance of Elastic Internet Applications, Joachim Charzinski analyzes HTTP, SMTP and POP3 traffic traces in regard to statistics about elements in Web pages, number of e-mails in an SMTP connection, number of parallel connections, download delays, and so on. We would like to give a very big thanks to the reviewers for this special issue and to the many researchers who contributed papers. We hope that you the reader find this special issue to be valuable and useful. We very much enjoyed putting together this special issue. Frank Huebner received his M.S. degree in C.S. in 1989 from University of Erlangen/ Nurenberg, Germany and his PhD degree in C.S. in 1994 from University of Wuerzburg, Germany. After working for Telstra, Bellcore (now Telcordia) and AT&T Labs, he joined the AT&T/BT Global Venture Concert. He returned to AT&T Labs in spring of 2002, where he currently manages the Managed Services Validation department. His research interests include IP traffic modeling, performance analysis and congestion control. Frank is on the editorial boards for Computer Communications and Telecommunication Systems. He is co-chairman of SPIE’s ITCOM Internet, Performance & Control of Network Systems conference and serves on the organizing committee of the IEEE Local Computer Networks conference.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1-813-974-4761; fax: þ 1-813-974-5456.
Ken Christensen received his PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University in 1991. He is an Associate Professor at the University of South Florida where his main research interest is in high-speed switch architectures. Ken is on the editorial boards for Computer Communications and the International Journal of Network Management, and is a subject area editor for IEEE ITPro magazine. Ken is on the organizing committee for the IEEE Local Computer Networks conference. Ken is a member of ACM and ASEE, a senior member of IEEE, and a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of Florida. His homepage is at http://www.csee.usf.edu/~christen.
F. Huebner AT&T Labs, Room MT-D5-2C05, 200 Laurel Avenue, Middletown, NJ 07748, USA E-mail address: [email protected] K. Christensen* Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, ENB 118, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA E-mail address: [email protected] Received 7 August 2002; Accepted 7 August 2002