BU/NSF Workshop on Internet Measurement, Instrumentation and Characterization

OBJECTIVES AND OVERVIEW Because of its growth in size, scope, and complexity--as well as its increasingly central role in society--the Internet has become an important object of study and evaluation. Many significant innovations in the networking community in recent years have been directed at obtaining a more accurate understanding of the fundamental behavior of the complex system that is the Internet. These innovations have come in the form of better models of components of the system, better tools which enable us to measure the performance of the system more accurately, and new techniques coupled with performance evaluation which have delivered better system utilization. The continued development and improvement of our understanding of the properties of the Internet is essential to guide designers of hardware, protocols, and applications for the next decade of Internet growth. As a research community, an important next step involves an comprehensive look at the challenges that lie ahead in this area. This includes an an evaluation of both the current unsolved challenges and the upcoming challenges the Internet will present us with in the near future, and a discussion of the promising new techniques that innovators in the field are currently developing. To this end, the Web and InterNetworking Research Group at Boston University (WING@BU), with support from the National Science Foundation, (grant #9985484) organized a one-day workshop which was held at Boston University on Monday, August 30, 1999 (immediately preceding ACM SIGCOMM '99).National Science Foundation (9985484

Consensus and Control in Wide-Area Group Communication

Agreement on and control of group membership are basic, but inadequately addressed problems in wide-area group communication. These problems arise in supporting services such as multicast transport, multiparty teleconferencing, secure multicasting, etc. In this paper, we consider a symmetric group communication environment, where each member could be a sender as well as a receiver of multicast messages, and address the problems of maintaining consistent group membership information at each member and controlling the manner in which group membership changes, using distributed protocols. A dynamic network environment is assumed, where process and network failures may occur unpredictably and message delivery is unreliable. Unlike prior work in this area, our protocols are general and flexible; they tolerate partitioning network failures and do not require consistent network-level routing information being present at each network node. 1. Introduction Agreement on and control of group m..

The Multi-Level Path Vector Routing Scheme

This document describes protocols that are part of the Multi-Level Path Vector (MLPV) routing scheme being developed for use in PIP internets. MLPV is a hierarchical routing scheme. It allows an arbitrary number of levels in the topological hierarchy and arbitrary interconnections within and across levels. Conceptually, the execution of MLPV in a PIP router consists of running multiple, independent instances of a path vector routing algorithm, one for each level of the hierarchy that routes are being computed. This document describes the MLPV topological model and specifies the basic path vector routing schemes used at various levels of the hierarchy. Status of this document This document is an Internet Draft. Internet Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its Areas, and its Working Groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet Drafts). Internet Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months. Intern..