The Internet has grown rapidly along several dimensions over the past decade. Yet, the core transport mechanisms used in its operation have not changed much. It is difficult to believe that the assumptions on which network designs were based a decade ago are valid even today. Unfortunately, due to the in-feasibility of collecting sufficient statistics in the past, answers to several fundamental questions related to the transport protocols performance in today's Internet are unknown: "Is there any congestion in today's Internet? Are transport mechanisms of the past working well for current applications? If not, how can they be redesigned?" This project addresses these questions through:
(1) extensive measurements and analysis to develop a fundamental understanding of transport performance of networks and validate legacy assumptions;
(2) investigation of the impact of invalid assumptions on the design, analysis, and evaluation of existing transport mechanisms; and
(3) design of new mechanisms and analysis techniques based on the findings.
Once completed, this project will help scientifically re-assess the principle and assumptions used in the design of Internet transport protocols in the past and will also benefit several communities. First, experience in measurements and analysis is invaluable to federal, commercial, and academic institutions that are involved in mining for information in large data-sets. Second, the use of measurement tools in Computer Science education will help train graduate and undergraduate students with important skill set and help develop new pedagogical techniques. Third, the design of transport protocols that scale with technological advancement will impact the use of the Internet for scientific research and distributed analysis.
