Subject: paper available: On the Effective Evaluation of TCP

From: Mark Allman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 23:01:28 -0400

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To: [email-masked]
Cc: "Aaron Falk" <[email-masked]>
From: Mark Allman <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: [email-masked]
Subject: paper available: On the Effective Evaluation of TCP
Organization: Late Night Hackers, NASA Glenn, Cleveland, Ohio
Song-of-the-Day: Walking in Memphis
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 23:01:28 -0400
Sender: [email-masked]

Just a quick announcement of the availability of a paper Aaron Falk
and I put together on techniques researchers should use when
investigating TCP and potential changes to TCP.  We wrote this paper
mainly for newcomers to TCP research and so it may be old news to
some of you (since we have learned much from many folks on these
lists), but the paper might serve as a good reminder.  We hope this
paper encourages folks to continue to examine and extend TCP in
compelling ways.  I appologize for the multiple copies of this you
may receive.

allman

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Mark Allman, Aaron Falk.  On the Effective Evaluation of TCP, ACM
Computer Communication Review, 29(5), October 1999.

Understanding the performance of the Internet's Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP) is important because it is the dominant protocol used
in the Internet today. Various testing methods exist to evaluate TCP
performance, however all have pitfalls that need to be understood
prior to obtaining useful results. Simulating TCP is difficult
because of the wide range of variables, environments, and
implementations available. Testing TCP modifications in the global
Internet may not be the answer either: testing new protocols on real
networks endangers other people's traffic and, if not done
correctly, may also yield inaccurate or misleading results. In order
for TCP research to be independently evaluated in the Internet
research community there is a set of questions that researchers
should try to answer. This paper attempts to list some of those
questions and make recommendations as to how TCP testing can be
structured to provide useful answers.

http://roland.grc.nasa.gov/~mallman/papers/tcp-evaluation.ps
http://roland.grc.nasa.gov/~mallman/papers/tcp-evaluation.pdf

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