[10187] in North American Network Operators' Group
paper on analyzing packet traces of TCP behavior available
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vern Paxson)
Tue Jun 24 16:35:10 1997
To: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 12:03:42 PDT
From: Vern Paxson <vern@ee.lbl.gov>
[My apologies to those of you who will receive multiple copies of this
announcement from other mailing lists ...]
The paper "Automated Packet Trace Analysis of TCP Implementations",
to appear in SIGCOMM '97, is now available from:
ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/papers/vp-tcpanaly-sigcomm97.ps.Z
I've appended the abstract.
Vern
Automated Packet Trace Analysis of TCP Implementations
Vern Paxson
Network Research Group
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
vern@ee.lbl.gov
We describe "tcpanaly", a tool for automatically analyzing a TCP
implementation's behavior by inspecting packet traces of the TCP's
activity. Doing so requires surmounting a number of hurdles, including
detecting packet filter measurement errors, coping with ambiguities due to
the distance between the measurement point and the TCP, and accommodating a
surprisingly large range of behavior among different TCP implementations.
We discuss why our efforts to develop a fully general tool failed, and
detail a number of significant differences among 8 major TCP implementations,
some of which, if ubiquitous, would devastate Internet performance. The
most problematic TCPs were all independently written, suggesting that
correct TCP implementation is fraught with difficulty. Consequently, it
behooves the Internet community to develop testing programs and reference
implementations.
