Results: Effects of Round Trip Times and Connection Structures on Application and Network Performance

Abstract

In this chapter, we present results for the core set of connection replay experiments conducted for this study. We used combinations of four connection structure models, three round trip time (RTT) emulation models, two network link modes, and two sets of traffic mixes for generating traffic for these experiments. For each experiment, we studied the effect of traffic generation on four performance metrics. Two were application-level metrics: connection durations and epoch response times; two were network-level metrics: router queue length and the number of active connections in the network per unit time.

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: the test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth”… Also needed is imagination to create from these hints [experimental results] the great generalizations – to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all.

– Richard Feynman [The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 1965]