End to End Internet Packet Dynamics

This paper is a report based off of measurements off of the internet between 1994 and 1995. It tries to evaluate the performance of the internet and observe if there are any anomalies or weird dynamic behavior within the internet and specifically TCP. The paper evaluates several things, including out-of-0rder delivery, packet corruption, bottleneck bandwidth, packet duplication, packet delay etc. It takes traces from real internet data and analyzes the effects of each one.

A couple interesting things i saw from the paper. I didn't even know that packet duplication existed within the internet. Thus, when i read about it in the paper, it was quite interesting. Them receiving 9 copies of the same packet, that was kind of funny. The paper also studied the out of order delivery behavior of packets in the internet, and observed that it wasn't a rare event. But our of order doesn't necessarily decrease performance.

Overall i think these kind of studies can help us conclude a lot about specific internet behavior, such as TCP, in a specific region, but the whole internet is so complex and large, that it's hard to factor in everything when taking these huge amounts of data. Especially since they don't know about other traffic information, so the packet loss and packet delay etc can be caused by different factors. The next paper introduces another way of gathering data and analyzing the network, which takes on a more active role than purely analyzing packets.