The Extensive Challenges of Internet Application Measurement

The Internet has grown dramatically and evolved significantly over the past 10 years. Although this growth provides new opportunities and many value-added services for millions of Internet users, this growth also presents ongoing challenges to networking researchers, for whom the study of the Internet itself is the raison d'etre. Other than the network link speed, there are many technical challenges that make the monitoring of Internet applications difficult. To illustrate this point, this article presents several practical examples drawn from our experiences in Internet application measurement and monitoring