Toronto Networking Seminar



Monarch: A Tool to Emulate Transport Protocol Flows over the Internet at Large

Stefan Saroiu
Department of Computer Science
 University of Toronto

Date:  Friday, October 13,  3pm
Location: BA1170 (Bahen Center)

Abstract:

The goal of this talk is to familiarize our networking group with a very novel Internet measurement tool: Monarch. Monarch accurately emulates transport protocol flows from an end host controlled by its user to any other Internet host that responds to simple TCP, UDP, or ICMP packet probes. Since many Internet hosts and routers respond to such probes, Monarch can evaluate transport protocols, such as TCP Reno, TCP Vegas, and TCP Nice, over a large and diverse set of Internet paths. Monarch's ability to evaluate transport protocols with minimal support from the destination host enables many new measurement studies of unprecedented scale. I will show the feasibility of using Monarch for three example studies: (a) understanding transport protocol behavior over network paths that are less explored by the research community, such as paths to cable and DSL hosts, (b) investigating the relative performance of different transport protocol designs, such as TCP Vegas and TCP Reno, and (c) testing protocol implementations under a wide range of experimental conditions. Joint work with: Andreas Haeberlen, Marcel Dischinger, and Krishna P. Gummadi from Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.