Internet Research Needs Better Models

Another interesting paper I've discovered these days - published in 2002 - was Internet Research Needs Better Models, by Sally Floyd and Eddie Kohler (Berkeley). In there they conclude that Internet research has a great need for better models, and for better common evaluation of these models. Some of the wrong implicit assumptions that they point down as the cause of the problem are: 1) flows live for a long time and transfer a lot of data, 2) "dumbbell" topologies with one congested link are used, 3) flows on the congested link share a small range of round-trip times, 4) most data traffic across the link is one-way, 5) reverse-path traffic is rarely congested.

In the exact moment that I am specifying in detail my PhD work plan (thinking of source, demand and topology models, evaluation, etc.) it is really important to take the above-mentioned points into consideration.