Topics in network testing

The objective of the Network Testing Series of IEEE Communications Magazine is to provide a forum across academia and industry to address the design and implementation defects unveiled by network testing. In the industry, testing has been a mean to evaluate the design and implementation of a system. But in academia, a more common practice is to evaluate a design by mathematical analysis or simulation without actual implementations. A less common practice is to evaluate a design by testing a partial implementation. That is, academia focuses more deeply on algorithmic design evaluation, while industry has broader concerns on both algorithmic design and system implementation issues. Often an optimized algorithmic component cannot guarantee optimal operation of the whole system when other components throttle the overall performance.