Overview

Goals

1. research multicast-based estimators of the origins of degradation in network loss, delay and throughput;
2. develop a Multicast Inference Network Tool (MINT) which implements the estimators on network measurements;
3. deploy MINT in NIMI (the National Internet Measurement Infrastructure)

Accomplishments

• maximum likelihood based estimators have been developed for link loss rates, [1] [2]
• NIMI has been extended through the development of the zing and mflect tools to provide the ability to generate multicast traces that can be fed into a web-based tool MINT2000, the Multicast Inference Network Tool which incorporates the above estimators.
• estimators have also been developed for link delay distributions [6] and more computationally efficient estimators have been developed for the variance in the link delay [5],
• the estimators listed above assume that the topology of the tree connecting a sender to the receivers in the multicast session is known; several algorithms have been developed to identify the tree from end-end loss reports, [3],

Personnel

• AT&T Labs-Research: Ramon Caceres, Nick Duffield, Francesco LoPresti
• University Of Massachusetts: Joe Horowitz, Jim Kurose,  Don Towsley
• AT&T Center for Internet Research at ICSI: Vern Paxson

Talks

• An Inference technique for network measurement, R. Caceres, N.G. Duffield, J. Horowitz, D. Towsley,  4th Informs Telecommunications Conference, Boca Raton, March 1998
• The MINC (Multicast Inference of Network Characteristics) Project 1998 NGI DARPA PI Meeting, October 1998.

Papers

1. Multicast-based inference of network-internal loss characteristics, R. Caceres, N.G. Duffield, J. Horowitz and D. Towsley. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 45, No. 7, pp. 2462 - 2480, Nov. 1999.
2. Multicast-Based Inference of Network-Internal Characteristics: Accuracy of Packet Loss Estimation, R. Caceres, N.G. Duffield, J. Horowitz, D. Towsley and T. Bu, Proceedings of INFOCOM'99.
3. Loss-based Inference of Multicast Network Topology, R. Caceres, N.G. Duffield, J. Horowitz, F. Lo Presti, D. Towsley, to be presented at CDC'99.
4. Inferring Link-level Performance from End-to-End Multicast Measurements, R. Caceres, N.G. Duffield, S.B. Moon, D. Towsley, to appear in Proc. IEEE/ISOC Global Internet '99, December 1999.
5. Multicast Inference of Packet Delay Variance at Interior Network Links, N.G. Duffield, F. Lo Presti, IEEE Infocom 2000, to appear.
6. Multicast -Based Inference of Network-Internal Delay Distributions, F. LoPresti, N.G. Duffield, J. Horowitz, & D. Towsley UMass Computer Science TR99-55, Nov. 1999. To appear in IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking.
7. The Use of End-to-end Multicast Measurements for Characterizing Internal Network Behavior. A. Adams, T. Bu, R. Caceres, N. Duffield, T.Friedman, J. Horowitz, F. Lo Presti, S.B. Moon, V. Paxson, D. Towsley, IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2000.
8. Inferring link loss using striped unicast probes. N.G. Duffield, F. Lo Presti, V. Paxson, D. Towsley, Proc. IEEE Infocom 2001, Anchorage, Alaska, April 22-26, 2001.
9. Tree Layout for Internal Network Characterizations in Multicast Networks. M. Adler, T. Bu, R. K. Sitaraman, D. Towsley. UMass CMPSCI Technical Report 00-44. A version of this appears in Proc. of NGC'01, Nov. 2001.
10. Multicast Topology Inference from Measured End-to-End Loss. N. Duffield, J. Horowitz, F. LoPresti, D. Towsley. `` IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 48(1), 26-45, 2002.
11. Multicast-based loss inference with missing data. N. Duffield, J. Horowitz, D. Towsley, W. Wei, T. Friedman. IEEE Journal of Selected Areas of Communications, 20(4), 700-713, May 2002.
12. Network Tomography on General Topology. T. Bu, N. Duffield, F. Lo Presti, D. Towsley, Proc. of ACM SIGMETRICS 2002.

Contacts