Monarch: a tool to emulate transport protocol flowsover the internet at large

This paper proposes Monarch, a novel tool that accurately emulates transport protocol flows from an end host controlled by its user to any other Internet host that responds to simple TCP, UDP, or ICMP packet probes. Since many Internet hosts and routers respond to such probes, Monarch can evaluate transport protocols, such as TCP Reno, TCP Vegas, and TCP Nice, over a large and diverse set of Internet paths. Current approaches to evaluating these protocols need control over both end hosts of an Internet path. Consequently, they are limited to a small number of paths between nodes in testbeds like PlanetLab, RON or NIMI. Monarch's ability to evaluate transport protocols with minimal support from the destination host enables many new measurement studies. We show the feasibility of using Monarch for three example studies: (a) understanding transport protocol behavior over network paths that are less explored by the research community, such as paths to cable and DSL hosts, (b) investigating the relative performance of different transport protocol designs, such as TCP Vegas and TCP Reno, and (c) testing protocol implementations under a wide range of experimental conditions.

[1]  Arun Venkataramani,et al.  Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation Tcp Nice: a Mechanism for Background Transfers , 2022 .

[2]  Robert Tappan Morris,et al.  Experience with an evolving overlay network testbed , 2003, CCRV.

[3]  Ramesh Govindan,et al.  Estimating Router ICMP Generation Delays , 2002 .

[4]  Cheng Jin,et al.  FAST TCP: Motivation, Architecture, Algorithms, Performance , 2006, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[5]  Mike Hibler,et al.  An integrated experimental environment for distributed systems and networks , 2002, OPSR.

[6]  Injong Rhee,et al.  Binary increase congestion control (BIC) for fast long-distance networks , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[7]  Tom Kelly,et al.  Scalable TCP: improving performance in highspeed wide area networks , 2003, CCRV.

[8]  Stefan Savage,et al.  Measuring packet reordering , 2002, IMW '02.

[9]  Dawson R. Engler,et al.  Model Checking Large Network Protocol Implementations , 2004, NSDI.

[10]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Inferring TCP connection characteristics through passive measurements , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[11]  Mark Handley,et al.  Congestion control for high bandwidth-delay product networks , 2002, SIGCOMM '02.

[12]  Jean-Chrysostome Bolot,et al.  Characterizing End-to-End Packet Delay and Loss in the Internet , 1993, J. High Speed Networks.

[13]  Sally Floyd,et al.  The NewReno Modification to TCP's Fast Recovery Algorithm , 2004, RFC.

[14]  Mark Carson,et al.  NIST Net: a Linux-based network emulation tool , 2003, CCRV.

[15]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Measuring interactions between transport protocols and middleboxes , 2004, IMC '04.

[16]  Stefan Savage,et al.  Sting: A TCP-based Network Measurement Tool , 1999, USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.

[17]  Krishna P. Gummadi,et al.  Sprobe: A fast technique for measuring bottleneck bandwidth in uncooperative environments , 2002, INFOCOM 2002.

[18]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  TCP behavior of a busy Internet server: analysis and improvements , 1997, Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98.

[19]  V. Paxson.  End-to-end routing behavior in the internet , 2006, CCRV.

[20]  Paul Barford,et al.  Scalable network path emulation , 2005, 13th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems.

[21]  Mark Handley,et al.  Equation-based congestion control for unicast applications , 2000, SIGCOMM.

[22]  Sally Floyd,et al.  RFC 2018: TCP Selective Acknowledgment Options , 1996 .

[23]  Krishna P. Gummadi,et al.  SProbe: A fast tool for measuring bottleneck bandwidth in un-cooperative environments , 2002 .

[24]  Giorgio Ventre,et al.  Network Simulator NS2 , 2008 .

[25]  Venkata N. Padmanabhan,et al.  Some findings on the network performance of broadband hosts , 2003, IMC '03.

[26]  Pasi Sarolahti,et al.  Congestion Control in Linux TCP , 2002, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, FREENIX Track.

[27]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Measuring the evolution of transport protocols in the internet , 2005, CCRV.

[28]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  Predicting short-transfer latency from TCP arcana: a trace-based validation , 2005, IMC '05.

[29]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  RAP: An end-to-end rate-based congestion control mechanism for realtime streams in the Internet , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[30]  Sally Floyd,et al.  HighSpeed TCP for Large Congestion Windows , 2003, RFC.

[31]  Ren Wang,et al.  TCP westwood: Bandwidth estimation for enhanced transport over wireless links , 2001, MobiCom '01.

[32]  Krishna P. Gummadi,et al.  King: estimating latency between arbitrary internet end hosts , 2002, IMW '02.

[33]  Dejan Kostic,et al.  Scalability and accuracy in a large-scale network emulator , 2002, CCRV.

[34]  Krishna P. Gummadi,et al.  King: estimating latency between arbitrary internet end hosts , 2002, IMW '02.

[35]  Sally Floyd,et al.  TCP Selective Acknowledgement Options , 1996 .

[36]  Stefan Saroiu,et al.  A Measurement Study of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems , 2001 .

[37]  Ratul Mahajan,et al.  User-level internet path diagnosis , 2003, SOSP '03.

[38]  Sally Floyd,et al.  The NewReno Modification to TCP's Fast Recovery Algorithm , 2004, RFC.

[39]  David L. Black,et al.  The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP , 2001, RFC.

[40]  Larry L. Peterson,et al.  TCP Vegas: End to End Congestion Avoidance on a Global Internet , 1995, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[41]  Thomas E. Anderson,et al.  PCP: Efficient Endpoint Congestion Control , 2006, NSDI.

[42]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Identifying the tcp behavior of web servers , 2000, SIGCOMM 2000.

[43]  Luigi Rizzo,et al.  Dummynet: a simple approach to the evaluation of network protocols , 1997, CCRV.

[44]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Experiences with NIMI , 2002, Proceedings 2002 Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT) Workshops.