Abstract
TCP has become the dominant protocol for all network data transport because it presents a simple uniform data delivery service which is sufficient for most applications over all types of lower network layers. By its very nature, TCP's adaption and retransmission strategies hide all of the details of the lower layers from the application. For example the only symptom of spurious packet loss (or nearly any other network problem) is longer elapsed time and lower performance.This information hiding is fundamentally important to the growth of the Internet because it decouples the evolution of applications from the evolution of link layers. However it also hides valuable information from researchers, educators, network administrators, and other people who would benefit from insight into the inner workings of TCP and the lower layers.In this paper, we present an architecture and infrastructure that provides for per-connection TCP instrumentation to expose otherwise hidden protocol events. We show examples how the infrastructure can be used in support of research, education and advanced network diagnostic tools.Our work was motivated by the observation that since about 1985 network data rates for typical novice network users have fallen by about three orders of magnitude behind expert users (who have kept up with Moore's Law). We use the term "Wizard Gap" to describe this phenomenon. The Web100 and Net100 projects were formed as one step in closing the Wizard Gap.
- M. Allman, V. Paxson, and W. Stevens. Tcp congestion control, RFC2581, April 1999.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- ANINEAR. Advanced networking infrastructure needs in the atmospheric and related sciences (aninars) workshop report. http://www.scd.ucar.edu/nets/projects/completed/1999.complete.projects/nlanr/ final.report.htm.]]Google Scholar
- L. S. Brakmo, S. W. O'Malley, and L. L. Peterson. TCP vegas: New techniques for congestion detection and avoidance. In ACM SIGCOMM, pages 24--35, 1994.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- CAIDA. Internet tools taxonomy, 2003. http://www.caida.org/tools/taxonomy/.]]Google Scholar
- R. Carlson. Developing the Web100 based network diagnostic tool (NDT). PAM, April 2003.]]Google Scholar
- D. D. Clark. Window and acknowledgement strategy in TCP, RFC813, July 1982.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. Dunigan. Floyd's TCP slow-start and AIMD mods, 2003. http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~dunigan/netperf/floyd.html.]]Google Scholar
- T. Dunigan. Kelly's scalable TCP AIMD mods, 2003. http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~dunigan/netperf/kelly.html.]]Google Scholar
- T. Dunigan. ORNL TCP Web100 bandwidth tester, 2003. http://firebird.ccs.ornl.gov:7123/.]]Google Scholar
- T. Dunigan, M. Mathis, and B. Tierney. A TCP Tuning Daemon. Supercomputing 2002, November 2002.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. Feng, M. Fisk, M. Gardner, and E. Weigle. Dynamic Right-Sizing: An Automated, Lightweight, and Scalable Technique for Enchancing Grid Performance. 7th PfHSN, page 16, April 2002.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Floyd. HighSpeed TCP for Large Congestion Windows. Work-in- Progress: IETF Internet-Draft, August 2003. http://www.ietf.org/internetdrafts/draft-ietf-tsvwg-highspeed-01.txt.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Floyd. Limited Slow-Start for TCP with Large Congestion Windows. Work in progress: IETF Internet-Draft, July 2003. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-tsvwg-slowstart-00.txt.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Floyd and V. Paxson. Diffculties in simulating the internet. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 9(4):392--403, August 2001.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Handley, J. Padhye, and S. Floyd. TCP congestion window validation, RFC2861, June 2000.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Heffner. High bandwidth TCP queuing, July 2002. http://www.psc.edu/~jheffner/papers/senior_thesis.ps.]]Google Scholar
- V. Jacobson. Modified TCP congestion avoidance algorithm. Message to end2end-interest list, April 1990. ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/email/vanj.90apr30.txt.]]Google Scholar
- V. Jacobson, R. Braden, and D. Borman. TCP extensions for high performance, RFC1323, May 1992.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Jin et al. FAST kernel: Background theory and experimental results. In First International Workshop on Protocols for Fast Long-Distance Networks, February 2003.]]Google Scholar
- T. Kelly. Scalable TCP: Improving performance in highspeed wide area networks. In First International Workshop on Protocols for Fast Long-Distance Networks, February 2003.]]Google Scholar
- LBNL. Network tools analysis framework (ntaf), 2003. http://www-didc.lbl.gov/NTAF/.]]Google Scholar
- J. Lee, M. Stoufer, and B. Tierney. Monitoring data archives for Grid environments. Supercomputing 2002, November 2002.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Mathis. Pushing up performance for everyone, December 1999. Presentation to Joint Techs workshop (first use of wizard gap).]]Google Scholar
- M. Mathis, J. Heffner, R. Reddy, and J. Saperia. TCP Extended Statistics MIB. Work in progress: IETF Internet-Draft, November 2002. Status page: http://www.web100.org/mib.]]Google Scholar
- M. Mathis, J. Mahdavi, S. Floyd, and A. Romanow. TCP selective acknowledgement options, RFC2018, October 1996.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Mathis and R. Reddy. Enabling High Performance Data Transfers, 2002. http://www.psc.edu/networking/perf_tune.html.]]Google Scholar
- M. Mathis and R. Reddy. Pathprobe: Network Path Diagnostic Tools, 2002. http://www.psc.edu/~web100/pathprobe/.]]Google Scholar
- M. Mathis, J. Semke, and J. Mahdavi. The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm. Computer Communications Review, 27(3), 1997.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Mogul and S. Deering. Path MTU discovery, RFC1191, November 1990.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Nagle. Congestion control in IP/TCP internetworks, RFC896, January 1984.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- Net100. Home page, 2003. http://www.net100.org/.]]Google Scholar
- NLANR. Iperf---the TCP/UDP bandwidth measurement tool, 2002. http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/.]]Google Scholar
- S. Ostermann. TCPtrace, 2003. http://www.tcptrace.org/.]]Google Scholar
- V. Paxson and M. Allman. Computing TCP's retransmission timer, RFC2988, November 2000.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- V. Paxson and S. Floyd. Why we don't know how to simulate the internet. In Winter Simulation Conference, pages 1037--1044, 1997.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Ramakrishnan, S. Floyd, and D. Black. A proposal to add explicit congestion notification (ECN) to IP, RFC3168, September 2001.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Reddy. SYN option check server, 2003. http://syntest.psc.edu:7961/.]]Google Scholar
- J. Semke, J. Mahdavi, and M. Mathis. Automatic TCP Buffer Tuning. In ACM SIGCOMM, pages 315--323, 1998.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Tierney. Using NetLogger and Web100 for TCP analysis. Protocols for High Speed Networks. http://www-didc.lbl.gov/papers/PFDL.tierney.pdf.]]Google Scholar
- A. Tirumala, L. Cottrell, and T. Dunigan. Measuring end-toend bandwidth with Iperf using Web100. PAM, April 2003.]]Google Scholar
- G. Turner. tcpestats: A Net-SNMP AgentX agent implementing the Web100 Project's TCP Extended Statistics MIB, 2002. http://www.aarnet.edu.au/network/software/web100/.]]Google Scholar
- C. Villamizar and C. Song. High performance TCP in ANSNET. Computer Communications Review, 24(5), 1995.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- Web100. Kernel Instrument Set, 2002. http://www.web100.org/download/kernel/alpha2.0/tcp-kis.txt.]]Google Scholar
- G. Wood. 12--NEWS: Internet2 Land Speed Winners Set New Transcontinental Internet Performance Records, 2002. http://mail.internet2.edu:8080/guest/archives/i2-news/log200003/msg00011.html.]]Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Web100: extended TCP instrumentation for research, education and diagnosis
Recommendations
Setting up a Web100-Dummynet testbed for research in transport layer protocols
ACM-SE 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Southeast regional conference - Volume 2With recent developments in technology broadening the complexity and performance issues of computer networks, more work is being put in to studying the behavior of network protocols under various new environments. As it stands today, TCP is the dominant ...
A modification of TCP flow control for improving end-to-end TCP performance over networks with wireless links
End-to-end Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performance is one of the more important issues in wireless Internet services. This paper proposes the improvement of end-to-end TCP performance via a TCP-aware link layer protocol called Adaptive TCP (A-...
Logarithmic window increase for TCP Westwood+ for improvement in high speed, long distance networks
The majority of current Internet applications uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for ensuring reliable end-to-end delivery of data over IP networks. The resulting path is, generally speaking, characterized by fairly large propagation delays (of ...
Comments