Growth trends in wide-area TCP connections

A recently completed single-site study has yielded information about how Internet traffic will evolve, as new users discover the Internet and existing users find new ways to incorporate the Internet into their work patterns. The author reviews existing statistics and studies of network growth, which show that network traffic generally grows exponentially with time, at least until the network carrying capacity is reached. He then describes how he captured and reduced the data used in this study. The following points are also addressed: the overall growth in the site's wide-area traffic; the appearance of periodic traffic; the growth in network use by individual computers or users; and the changing geographic profile of the traffic. The implications and limitations of the results are also summarizes     

Synthetic Butterfly Scale Surfaces with Compliance‐Tailored Anisotropic Drop Adhesion

Many natural surfaces such as butterfly wings, beetles' backs, and rice leaves exhibit anisotropic liquid adhesion; this is of fundamental interest and is important to applications including self‐cleaning surfaces, microfluidics, and phase change energy conversion. Researchers have sought to mimic the anisotropic adhesion of butterfly wings using rigid surface textures, though natural butterfly scales are sufficiently compliant to be deflected by capillary forces exerted by drops. Here, inspired by the flexible scales of the Morpho aega butterfly wing, synthetic surfaces coated with flexible carbon nanotube (CNT) microscales with anisotropic drop adhesion properties are fabricated. The curved CNT scales are fabricated by a strain‐engineered chemical vapor deposition technique, giving ≈5000 scales of ≈10 µm thickness in a 1 cm² area. Using various designed CNT scale arrays, it is demonstrated that the anisotropy of drop roll‐off angle is influenced by the geometry, compliance, and hydrophobicity of the scales; and a maximum roll‐off anisotropy of 6.2° is achieved. These findings are supported by a model that relates the adhesion anisotropy to the scale geometry, compliance, and wettability. The electrical conductivity and mechanical robustness of the CNTs, and the ability to fabricate complex multidirectional patterns, suggest further opportunities to create engineered synthetic scale surfaces.     

The reactivity of 1,3-butadiene with butadiene-derived popcorn polymer

Adiabatic calorimetry performed on butadiene-derived popcorn polymer samples from industrial facilities has revealed exothermic behavior accompanied by non-condensible gas production, indicative of possible decomposition, at elevated temperatures. In the presence of low concentrations of 1,3-butadiene, reactivity is observed at temperatures of 60-70 degrees C; that is, 20-30 degrees C below those usually seen for butadiene alone. Once the butadiene is consumed, the reaction behavior reverts to that of the popcorn polymer alone. At higher butadiene concentrations, the low temperature reaction persists, eventually merging with typical butadiene behavior. The butadiene reactivity with popcorn polymer is attributed to polymerization reaction at free radical sites in the popcorn polymer. Different popcorn polymer samples exhibit distinct extents of reactivity, presumably depending on the nature and concentration of the free radical sites and the structure of the material. Uninhibited butadiene exposed to 100 psia air, which may act to generate peroxide species, shows a small, additional exotherm around 50-80 degrees C. Contact of butadiene with lauroyl peroxide, providing free radicals upon decomposition, generates an exotherm at temperatures as low as 60 degrees C.     

High hydrostatic pressure effects on bacterial bioluminescence

The mechanism that leads to microbial inactivation by high hydrostatic pressure remains elusive. In this study, a high-pressure system interfaced with a photomultiplier tube (PMT) was developed to monitor cellular metabolism in situ using bioluminescent bacterial strains. Preliminary characterization of the system was performed using Pseudomonas fluorescens 5RL expressing lux proteins from Vibrio fischeri. Stepwise increases in pressure at 34 MPa and above resulted in decreased bioluminescence. Square wave exposure to pressures of 69, 103 and 138 MPa showed bioluminescence reductions greater than 95%, but when cells were returned to ambient pressure bioluminescence returned to 51, 38, and 4% of initial bioluminescence values, respectively. An Escherichia coli strain expressing lux proteins from V. fischeri was constructed to determine whether this reversible effect could be observed in another bacterial genus. Square wave perturbations of 69, 103 and 138 MPa resulted in bioluminescence reductions of about 94% at the highest pressure treatment. Upon decompression, bioluminescence returned to 74, 58 and 30% of the initial bioluminescence values for cells treated at 69, 103 and 138 MPa, respectively. These results suggest that square wave exposure to pressure up to 138 MPa induces reversible cell damage in P. fluorescens 5RL and E. coli VF lux.     

The use of end-to-end multicast measurements for characterizinginternal network behavior

We present a novel methodology for identifying internal network performance characteristics based on end-to-end multicast measurements. The methodology, solidly grounded on statistical estimation theory, can be used to characterize the internal loss and delay behavior of a network. Measurements on the MBone have been used to validate the approach in the case of losses. Extensive simulation experiments provide further validation of the approach, not only for losses, but also for delays. We also describe our strategy for deploying the methodology on the Internet. This includes the continued development of the National Internet Measurement Infrastructure to support RTP-based end-to-end multicast measurements and the development of software tools to analyze the traces. Once complete, this combined software/hardware infrastructure will provide a service for understanding and forecasting the performance of the Internet     

Inside the Slammer worm

The Slammer worm spread so quickly that human response was ineffective. In January 2003, it packed a benign payload, but its disruptive capacity was surprising. Why was it so effective and what new challenges do this new breed of worm pose?.     

An architecture for large scale Internet measurement

Historically, the Internet has been woefully under-measured and under-instrumented. The problem is only getting worse with the network's ever-increasing size. We discuss the goals and requirements for building a “measurement infrastructure” for the Internet, in which a collection of measurement “platforms” cooperatively measure the properties of Internet paths and clouds by exchanging test traffic among themselves. The key emphasis of the architecture, which forms the underpinnings of the National Internet Measurement Infrastructure (NIMI) project, is on tackling problems related to scale. Consequently, the architecture emphasizes decentralized control of measurements; strong authentication and security; mechanisms for both maintaining tight administrative control over who can perform what measurements using which platforms, and delegation of some forms of measurement as a site's measurement policy permits; and simple configuration and maintenance of platforms     

End-to-end routing behavior in the Internet

The large-scale behavior of routing In the Internet has gone virtually without any formal study, the exceptions being Chinoy's (1993) analysis of the dynamics of Internet routing information, and work, similar in spirit, by Labovitz, Malan, and Jahanian (see Proc. SIGCOMM'97, 1997). We report on an analysis of 40000 end-to-end route measurements conducted using repeated “traceroutes” between 37 Internet sites. We analyze the routing behavior for pathological conditions, routing stability, and routing symmetry. For pathologies, we characterize the prevalence of routing loops, erroneous routing, infrastructure failures, and temporary outages. We find that the likelihood of encountering a major routing pathology more than doubled between the end of 1994 and the end of 1995, rising from 1.5% to 3.3%. For routing stability, we define two separate types of stability, “prevalence”, meaning the overall likelihood that a particular route is encountered, and “persistence”, the likelihood that a route remains unchanged over a long period of time. We find that Internet paths are heavily dominated by a single prevalent route, but that the time periods over which routes persist show wide variation, ranging from seconds up to days. About two-thirds of the Internet paths had routes persisting for either days or weeks. For routing symmetry, we look at the likelihood that a path through the Internet visits at least one different city in the two directions. At the end of 1995, this was the case half the time, and at least one different autonomous system was visited 30% of the time     

End-to-end Internet packet dynamics

We discuss findings from a large-scale study of Internet packet dynamics conducted by tracing 20000 TCP bulk transfers between 35 Internet sites. Because we traced each 100-kbyte transfer at both the sender and the receiver, the measurements allow us to distinguish between the end-to-end behavior due to the different directions of the Internet paths, which often exhibit asymmetries. We: (1) characterize the prevalence of unusual network events such as out-of-order delivery and packet replication; (2) discuss a robust receiver-based algorithm for estimating “bottleneck bandwidth” that addresses deficiencies discovered in techniques based on “packet pair;” (3) investigate patterns of packet loss, finding that loss events are not well modeled as independent and, furthermore, that the distribution of the duration of loss events exhibits infinite variance; and (4) analyze variations in packet transit delays as indicators of congestion periods, finding that congestion periods also span a wide range of time scales