Short messages

This paper has three purposes. The first one is to explain to a general audience what is involved in retrieving a web page or performing some other complex network transaction, and what can make it slow, and why the problem of slowness is likely to get worse as networked applications become more complex. The second is to describe, to those who program networked applications, certain facts that we have learnt from modelling communication networks, notably the fact of heavy-tailed distributions in traffic, which may allow more efficient applications to be written. The third is to describe to network modellers an interesting class of problems relating to algorithm design for communication networks.

[1]  V. Jacobson,et al.  Congestion avoidance and control , 1988, SIGCOMM '88.

[2]  Walter Willinger,et al.  On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic , 1993, SIGCOMM '93.

[3]  Keith Marzullo,et al.  Election Vs. Consensus in Asynchronous Systems , 1995 .

[4]  Azer Bestavros,et al.  Self-similarity in World Wide Web traffic: evidence and possible causes , 1996, SIGMETRICS '96.

[5]  Walter Willinger,et al.  Proof of a fundamental result in self-similar traffic modeling , 1997, CCRV.

[6]  Leslie Lamport,et al.  The part-time parliament , 1998, TOCS.

[7]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Measurement and modelling of the temporal dependence in packet loss , 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).

[8]  Edith Cohen,et al.  Prefetching the means for document transfer: a new approach for reducing Web latency , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[9]  Indranil Gupta,et al.  A Probabilistically Correct Leader Election Protocol for Large Groups , 2000, DISC.

[10]  Doyle,et al.  Power laws, highly optimized tolerance, and generalized source coding , 2000, Physical review letters.

[11]  Andreas Willig,et al.  Measurements of a wireless link in an industrial environment using an IEEE 802.11-compliant physical layer , 2002, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron..

[12]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Increasing TCP's Initial Window , 1998, RFC.

[13]  Edith Cohen,et al.  Prefetching the means for document transfer: a new approach for reducing Web latency , 2002, Comput. Networks.

[14]  Michael Mitzenmacher,et al.  A Brief History of Generative Models for Power Law and Lognormal Distributions , 2004, Internet Math..

[15]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Design and analysis of a leader election algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks , 2004, Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, 2004. ICNP 2004..

[16]  Damon Wischik,et al.  A Reliable Protocol for Synchronous Rendezvous (note) , 2004 .

[17]  Federico Fariña,et al.  Efficient leader election in complete networks , 2005, 13th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing.

[18]  Herbert Bos,et al.  File size distribution on UNIX systems: then and now , 2006, OPSR.

[19]  Jean-Philippe Martin,et al.  Fast Byzantine Consensus , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

[20]  F. Donelson Smith,et al.  A Performance Study of Loss Detection/Recovery in Real-world TCP Implementations , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols.