Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!wuccrc!dworkin!christos
From: christos@dworkin.wustl.edu (Chris Papadopoulos)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Looking for probes for TCP/IP
Message-ID: <2081@olympus.wustl.edu>
Date: 13 Nov 90 19:10:54 GMT
Sender: usenet@dworkin.wustl.edu
Organization: Washington University,  St Louis MO
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Nntp-Posting-Host: dworkin

Let me first introduce myself. I am Christos Papadopoulos, a graduate
student at Washington Univ working with Guru Parulkar. I am interested
in remote visualization. I plan to implement an application which we
think has characteristics typical of visualization applications and
distribute it across our campus network using TCP/IP. Then tap in the
protocols at different levels and take various measurements to
identify where the bottlenecks are (if any).  

The application we picked is "Display of cell trajectories in 3D
using Optical Sectioning Microscopy". This uses an optical microscope
equipped with a CCD camera to collect images of planes in an organism.
The big advantage of this method is that there is no physical slicing
involved, thus the organism does not have to be killed. The CCD camera
has variable pixel resolution of up to 1000 by 1000, at 4096 graylevels.
The volumetric data will be in the range of 10-20 MBytes per image. To
trace the trajectories of cells several images need to be collected to
construct a short animation. There is a number of steps that need to be
performed before the data can be rendered. These include elimination of
noise due to the point spread function of the lens, edge enhancement,
image segmentation and various geometric transformations.

After distributing the application we would like to monitor the
communication and take measurements on protocol overhead. The
communication model we think may be appropriate is as follows:

              TCPq     Networkq         Networkq    TCPq
--------      ----|      ----|           ----|      ----|      ----------
|Sender|----->  |||----->  |||---------->  |||----->  |||----->|Receiver|
--------      ----|      ----| Ethernet  ----|      ----|      ----------

    The measurements we would like to take include:
    	(i)	Dynamic queue length at the various queues
    	(ii)	Various delays a packet experiences

The question I want to ask is the following:

Are there probe and measurement utility programs which will allow us
to take these measurements without any kernel modifications? 

	Thanks in advance,

Christos.