Re: [IMRG] directing the discussion

I see IETF WG as customers, who could take better decisions if better data were available.

In no particular order

routing; there seems very little analysis of BGP and how it is used, what gets advertised how (thinking particularly of what does not get advertised and how, eg by aggregation or by communities and the AS_PATH of the advertisement v the path that data takes) - probably the one that interests me most but is also the most abstruse (I am aware of potaroo and the sterling work of Philip Smith)

traffic by application; one frequent discussion point with spam/UBE is the notion that operators do not care because this is such a small part of the load, BitTorrent and such like being the majority use of the Internet; true or false?

TCP(M); much discussion about the resetting of sessions, what that costs (slow start etc), would it be better to behave differently in the event of unexpected happenings (RST, ICMP); how frequent are these events?

segment sizes; crops up in IPv6 and network management; when 576 is too small, how many networks lose out if the effective minimum PDU needs to be something bigger?

congestion; until the advent of wireless, 'everyone knew' that packet loss was due to congestion and not to CRC checks; I have looked periodically for papers to support this and do not see them; and is wireless quite different, if so by how much?

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how bit is the Internet in terms of traffic, how fast is it growing? there was a question on this on the main IETF list some months ago, I never saw a reply.

not rocket science, mostly

Tom Petch

• Original Message ----- From: "Loki Jorgenson" <ljorgenson@apparentnetworks.com> To: "Jennifer Rexford" <jrex@CS.Princeton.EDU> Cc: <imrg@ietf.org> Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 11:57 PM Subject: RE: [IMRG] directing the discussion

All well received.

And I would add to your list of "who needs to the information" - applications people or people involved in applications research. These people are neither experimenting on the Internet or running the Internet. But they are involved in work that has a direct dependency on the Internet and networks in general. And they need to characterize the beast for their own purposes.

This is where I find the "rubber hits the road" and defines relevant metrics. And I imagine it is where some very interesting cross-pollination can take place (networking and.... something).

-----Original Message-----

From: Jennifer Rexford [mailto:jrex@CS.Princeton.EDU] Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 2:52 PM
To: Loki Jorgenson
Cc: imrg@ietf.org
Subject: RE: [IMRG] directing the discussion

-----8< --- snip -----------

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In terms of the important question of "who needs the information," I think
we have at least two camps -- those using data to characterize the beast (e.g., research folks trying to do experimental science on the Internet, including work on understanding the performance and limitations of our existing protocols and/or evaluate new designs) and those using data to run
the network (e.g., operators trying to detect anomalies, do traffic engineering, thwart attacks, etc.), though increasingly the lines are blurry
as more research folks jump in to creating and evaluating techniques for using measurement data to help operators.

• Jen

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