Internet Measurement Conference 2007

The program of the Internet Measurement Conference 2007 was very interesting. The best paper award went to I Tube, You Tube, Everybody Tubes: Analyzing the World's Largest User Generated Content Video System. Mia (that has been around in the Computer Lab for some time), Pablo Rodriguez (from Telefonica) et al presented a very detailed and interesting study on User Generated Content systems, like youtube.

I also enjoyed the article Characterizing Residential Broadband Networks. Some of the results were interesting: 1) packet transmissions over cable suffer high jitter as a result of cable’s time-slotted access policy (which can affect TCP Vegas due to its reliance on RTT), 2) DSL links show large last-hop delays and considerable deployment of active queue management policies such as random early detection (RED), 3) both cable and DSL ISPs use traffic shaping and deploy massive queues that can delay packets for several hundred milliseconds (really bad for things like VoIP).

It was also interesting to know that about 83% of IP packets are all-zero in the Type of Service field, and IP options are virtually not used, along with fragmentation. Oh, and Path MTU discovery rules... :) (check more on Analysis of Internet Backbone Traffic and Header Anomalies observed)

But the program is interesting as a whole and hence worth inspecting in detail.