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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Statistics and network analysis workshop
Hi: Lately we have been discussing with the NSF holding a workshop on statistics collection and network analysis. We are thinking about 4/5 January at SDSC in San Diego, but that is still open to changes. We believe we can comfortably accomodate 30 attendees and have an initial (not yet mailed out) invitation list, but are interested in suggestions from NANOG and IEPG relative to attendees and contents and expectations. If we end up with more than 30 people we will likely have to go by who has expressed most interest by means of position papers or so. I will attach a draft of the invitation letter we are planning to mail out. Please email me with your suggestions (no need to litter on the mailing lists). Hans-Werner Dear colleague: The existence of the NSFNET as a "central network" for the research and education community facilitated research into aspects of aggregate network traffic patterns and the anomalies in those patterns caused by the introduction of new or unique applications. Decommissioning the centralized NSFNET backbone resulted in an environment with no dependable public source of statistics on Internet workloads. Gaining insight into the nature of current workloads and their resource requirements, as well as how they change over time, is essential to supporting Internet evolution. For example, the disparity in workload profiles within the current cross section of Internet applications, ranging from high bandwidth-duration multimedia to historically less demanding e-mail or remote login, will necessitate revised metrics for describing aggregate network behavior. Simple mean or peak utilization figures will be dangerously ineffective in addressing a service provider's needs, without also knowing the `transaction' profile constituting and perhaps dominating those figures. (See http://www.nlanr.net/Fix for examples of traffic flow profiling, including data from the FIX-West multiagency network interconnection facility.) The NSF supported Routing Arbiter provides another source of operational statistics collection, via route servers at the NSF supported NAPs. The RA maintains NAP statistics on packet loss and latency among routing peers, BGP routing protocol message counts, route server memory utilization, and selected interface counts on the server. Details and sample statistics on the MAE-East facility are at http://www.ra.net/ra/statistics. To facilitate discussion among communities of academia, equipment vendors, and service providers, who share interest in and incentive to understand one another's views on network statistics and analysis, we will hold a workshop with support of the National Science Foundation. In this workshop we expect to identify, elicit and evaluate the cross sections of interest, goals, willingness, and technical capability to facilitate such studies in the new distributed environment. Critical to the discussions will be the presence of those who can set policy for design and configuration of Internet components: vendors who can design statistics collection mechanisms, and service providers who can ensure the effective employment of those mechanisms to support their short and medium term engineering requirements to deliver and maintain a stable on a daily basis. Also critical is a user representation, on who's behalf the network is built. If you would like to participate, it would help us greatly to obtain from you a short position statement in advance. ou will have an opportunity to discuss these views during the workshop. Please also let us know whether you are interested in giving a short presentation of your views to the workshop attendees. From the workshop we will construct a report to be distributed to the participants, the National Science Foundation, and other interested parties. We will also attempt to make position statements and pointers to relevant information available via the Web in advance, as we receive them, to allow for information distribution prior to the workshop. The workshop will be held in January 1996 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Attached you will find attendance information. Please confirm with us by responding to this note whether you expect to attend. We have submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation to help those participants who do not have own funding to cover the travel for the workshop. If this is the case for you, please contact us for information about possible availability of such funds. Hans-Werner Braun, and Kimberly C. Claffy (SDSC), and Mark W. Garrett (Bellcore) Workshop co-chairs
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