CCIRN Measurements Working Group meeting
December 12, 1997
Washington, DC

Draft Notes

I.  Participants
Guy Almes, I2
Julio Andrade, DynCorp
Bill St. Arnaud, CANARIE
Kilnam Chon, KAIST
John Coulter, CANARIE
Shigeki Goto, Waseda U
Rene Hatem, CANARIE
Sandra Jaque, REUNA
Hyungsuk Kim, KT
David Martin, Fermilab/DoE
Kevin Meynell, TERENA   
Toh Ee Ming, NUS-IRDU Singapore
Masaaki Nateshima, NTT
Niels den Otter, SURFnet
Roberto Sabatino, DANTE
Lai Zit Seng, NUS-IRDU Singapore
Byung-Cheol Shin, KAIST
George Strawn, NSF
Shuichi Tashiro, ETL

II.  Actions Items
*       Professor Goto will call a working group meeting in the first
week of March at the APAN meeting.
*       Begin to work on a proposal for collaboration on International
Research Networks
*       At ISMA(scheduled for early April) the measurement group will
put together a common set of tools.
*       Guy Almes to bring a proposal of the IP Performance for review.

III.  Proceedings

A. Global Traffic Measurement

Guy Almes, I2, gave a presentation of I2's IP Performance work in the
measurements area.  Their findings show that the topology is becoming
increasingly complex, loads are growing faster then capacity, and the
relationship among networks is increasingly competitive.  Their
objective is to facilitate the complex relations among networks.  They
have been working on a collaboration of advanced CSG surveyor
statistics.  The infrastructure will be built with a series of
measurement machines.  There will be a central database with a web
server to disseminate results.  The measurement machines are constantly
recording date and uploading it to the web server  for access.  At this
time there are 12 operational sites which are measuring delay and loss
of packets.  They will be  moving towards connecting 23 more labs,
including the GigaPops of I2. 

Guy presented a sample of the data that is retrievable from the web site
on overhead slides.  This data shows the amount of data that is lost and
delayed at certain periods of time. 


David Martin, DoE ESNet, presented on the ESNet Ping ER effort.  This
effort began by measuring all the routes a packet took in transit.
Through this they defined a link as the flow of traffic from one end
point to the other.  ESNet is using ICMP Ping packets to measure
availability and delay.  Analysis sites are setup to provide historical
reporting, unlike I2 whose data is updated and available immediately.
The collecting sites run PERL Script and CGI making date available via
HTTP, while maintaining a list of remote sites.   The analysis sites
retrieve data from the collecting sites, polling them sequentially for
the last 48 hours.  Each collection site is stored in a single SAS
dataset for each month.  

ESNet has found ICMP to prove itself as a good measurement of network
performance.  The effort to keep these sites running is significant.
All users want a single measure of link quality, using reasonable
parameters.  The historical data is useful, but ESNet would like to have
up to the minute date on select sites in the future.  They are also
looking at better grouping and presentation tools to display data
collected.  

This presentation led to a discussion on how to use a common tool for
measurement internationally.  The main focus in measurements is cost
sharing, for example, connecting at the STAR TAP.  It  was suggested,
that although proprietary, that Net Flow is being used by some of the
participants in the working group and it has proved to be very useful.
Kilnam Chon asked to see a proposal of I2's IP Performance to review and
possibly find some useful tools in measuring the international
connectivity. The group agrees that the largest barrier to moving
forward with connecting internationally is the session initiating.  At
this time their is no way to tell who initiates the connections across
these lines.  The question becomes does more difficult, for example,
does the US want the other countries to have this information, therefore
implying that the US is initiating the connection.  Or, is the
information readily available and the other countries are looking to
obtain this information, thus making them the initiating party. 

The group ended the discussion of a review of the action items, listed
above.  


Julio D.  Andrade
DynCorp I&ET
jandrade@snap.org