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- Hello,
-
- This is a bug fix message for tcplib, a library of TCP traffic models.
- We apologize for any inconvenience that this message may cause you.
-
- Vern Paxson of LBL noticed that "there's a rather huge spike in the UCB
- ftp-data connections [of the trace data used in tcplib]. During that
- particular day [when the traces was collected,] there were 2312
- connections of 74 bytes each between the same two UCB and remote hosts.
- [Ninety five percent] of these connections came between 30 and 45 seconds
- apart. None of the other datasets showed this sort of traffic so it
- clearly appears to be anomalous."
-
- Fortunately for us...the anomaly did not show up in either our SIGCOMM or
- Journal of Internetworking papers because of the way we grouped multiple
- ftp-data connections into one conversation.
-
- We have taken out the anomalous data from the two data files:
- ftp.nitems
- ftp.itemsize.
- Both are available on jerico.usc.edu (128.125.11.6) for anonymous ftp,
- in the directory pub/jamin/tcplib. These files are meant to replace
- their namesakes in the tcplib/data. To update your libtcp.a, remember
- to do a make in your tcplib directory after you replaced the two files.
-
- Alternatively, you can get the new library or the whole set of sources
- from jerico.usc.edu:pub/jamin/tcplib as described below. The papers
- [Caceres91] and [Danzig92] cited in the tech report are also available
- for anonymous ftp from jerico.usc.edu:~ftp/pub/jamin/traffic. The file
- traffic.ps.Z is for [Caceres91] and the files journal.part[1-4].ps.Z
- are for [Danzig92].
- =======================================================================
- The following technical report and the source library it describes are
- available for anonymous ftp from jerico.usc.edu:~ftp/pub/jamin/tcplib.
- (Jerico's IP address is 128.125.51.6.) The directory contains the
- following files:
-
- README
- libtcp_ds31_ultrix41.a.Z
- libtcp_hp90_hpux847.a.Z /* not supported anymore because we
- lost access to our hp machine. */
- libtcp_sun3_sunos411.a.Z
- libtcp_sun4_sunos411.a.Z
- brkdn_dist.h
- tcpapps.h
- tcplib.1
- tcplib.tar.Z
- tcplibtr.ps.Z
-
- All you need to transfer to use the library are: README, brkdn_dist.h,
- tcpapps.h, tcplib.1, and one of libtcp* that matches your setup. You
- need tcplib.tar.Z only if you must generate the library yourself.
- The file tcplibtr.ps.Z is the PostScript version of the tech. report
- which is introduced below:
-
-
- tcplib: A Library of TCP Internetwork Traffic Characteristics
-
- Peter B. Danzig Sugih Jamin
-
- Computer Science Department,
- University of Southern California,
- Los Angeles, California 90089-0781
-
- traffic@excalibur.usc.edu
-
- USC-CS-91-495
-
- 1. Introduction
- When simulating computer networks, it is necessary to specify the
- traffic between network nodes. Typically, simulation studies of
- wide-area tcp/ip networks model traffic as a combination of Poisson
- processes and maximal rate streams--corresponding to telnet traffic
- and large file transfers respectively. Such traffic models are
- justified when the modeler wants to show, for example, that his flow
- control or gateway scheduling algorithm responds well to worst case
- traffic or when essentially nothing is known about the real network
- traffic. However, such models do not reveal how similarly robust
- algorithms respond to the common case load.
- This paper describes tcplib, a library to help generate realistic
- tcp/ip network traffic. Tcplib is motivated by our observation that
- present-day wide-area tcp/ip traffic cannot be accurately modeled with
- simple analytical expressions, but instead requires a combination of
- detailed knowledge of the end-user applications responsible for the
- traffic and certain measured probability distributions [Caceres91].
- We collected three-day traces of wide-area Internet traffic at UC
- Berkeley, University of Southern California, and Bell Communications
- Research. Our study identified that out of more than 35 different
- application programs, ftp, smtp, nntp, vmnet, telnet, and rlogin are
- responsible for 96% of wide-area tcp/ip bytes. Two related studies,
- one at University College London and the other at Lawrence Berkeley
- Laboratory, identified a subset of these six applications as
- responsible for most of their wide-area tcp traffic [Crowcroft91]
- [Paxson91]. Tcplib models five of these six applications. It excluded
- vmnet, an IBM mail exchange application , because it was absent from
- three of the five traces. Furthermore, since telnet and rlogin have
- essentially the same characteristics, we have included in tcplib only
- routines describing telnetUs. Additionally, we included characteristics
- of phone conversations based on the study reported in [Brady65] and a
- distribution of conversations composition breakdown derived from several
- stub-network traces.
-