SPAND: Shared Passive Network Performance Discovery

In the Internet today, users and applications must often make decisions based on the performance they expect to receive from other Internet hosts. For example, users can often view many Web pages in low-bandwidth or highbandwidth versions, while other pages present users with long lists of mirror sites to chose from. Current techniques to perform these decisions are often ad hoc or poorly designed. The most common solution used today is to require the user to manually make decisions based on their own experience and whatever information is provided by the application. Previous efforts to automate this decision-making process have relied on isolated, active network probes from a host. Unfortunately, this method of making measurements has several problems. Active probing introduces unnecessary network traffic that can quickly become a significant part of the total traffic handled by busy Web servers. Probing from a single host results in less accurate information and more redundant netw...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: USITS
• Authors: Srinivasan Seshan, Mark Stemm, Randy H. Katz
• Keywords: Measurements, Network Probes, Passive Measurements, USITS 1997, USITS 2001