Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbatt!ucbvax!LOUIE.UDEL.EDU!Mills
From: Mills@LOUIE.UDEL.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  Analyzing Acknowledgement Strategies, continued
Message-ID: <8701171503.a003309@Huey.UDEL.EDU>
Date: Sat, 17-Jan-87 15:03:56 EST
Article-I.D.: Huey.8701171503.a003309
Posted: Sat Jan 17 15:03:56 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Jan-87 00:23:46 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 29
Approved: tcp-ip@sri-nic.arpa

Van,

Oh, yummy. Erstwhile grad student Mike Minnich here has been casting for
a dissertation topic. I think he just hooked his fish. It turns out to be
reasonably easy to capture real data to test various estimators, including
those you suggest, using the various fuzzballs scattered over the Internet
(some in positions of power). The easiest way of doing that is with ICMP
Echo messages with controlled spacing and size. The PING test program can
generate these messages under several different scenarios and collect the
RTTs in a file for later analysis. It would not be hard to add to that
program a scenario similar to that you suggest. I will include that on
Mike's plate of fish.

I already have a bunch of data collected under several scenarios and would
be glad to make it available to any who ask. The data include the test runs
described in RFC-889 plus the data collected recently and reported to this
list. All we need are some gullible number-cruncher hackers (having no
esthetic principles or agendae at all, I just hack in BASIC) willing to read
the texts you suggest (plus maybe H. van Trees' book(s) - you see how
old I am) and troll their own fishlines.

One of the things that struck me when I was experimenting with algorithms
similar to that suggested by Nagle was the enormous impact of the piggyback
mechanism with TELNET and remote echo. This affects the time series in
interesting ways and suggests a simplification where the traffic flows are
assumed symmetric. Otherwise, I think you may have to split your R(i) into
two components, one going and the other coming back.

Dave