Active Network Measurement:
Recent Solutions, Current Research, and Future Directions

Internet is a major backbone for communication these days. It runs a plethora of applications that connect users from different parts of the world. However, the performance of these applications depends on the qualitative state of the Internet which has to be determined for ensuring user satisfaction. Network measurement is an applied field of research that characterizes the Internet by measuring different network parameters for efficient use of the Internet infrastructure and for successful end-to-end communications with guaranteed user satisfaction.

This talk focuses on the active measurement of different network parameters that does not require a large infrastructural and administrative supports from the Internet. Here, new solutions for actively measuring two network parameters, packet processing time (PPT) of workstations and queueing delay at routers, will be initially discussed. PPT is a static network parameter whereas queueing delay is a dynamic network parameter in the Internet. This discussion will present the importance of the above stated network parameters, challenges to measure them in the Internet, and the accuracy of the proposed solutions both in the testbed and real-life environments. Then a preview of current research regarding PPT in the presence of a hardware artifact, called interrupt coalescence, in the network interface card of workstations and queueing delay over a multiple-hop path will be discussed. Finally, an overview of future research directions in the field of active network measurement will conclude the talk.