Case Studies in Computer Network Measurement

A network lies at the heart of many modern computer systems including most distributed and parallel systems. A good understanding of the behaviour and performance of the network is, therefore, a prerequisite for the understanding the behaviour and performance of many computer systems. Understanding network behaviour and performance is challenging because networks are among mankind's largest and most complex creations and because most networks, including the Internet, are not designed with network measurement in mind. As a consequence, much network measurement relies on inference from data that does not directly describe the item of interest. Measurement also often requires a widely spread physical infrastructure, for example a network of monitoring machines. This is expensive both in terms of the hardware required and the resources needed to deploy and maintain the systems.