CALL FOR PAPERS

              Measuring the Internet's Vital Statistics

      A Special Issue of ACM SIGCOMM COMPUTER COMMUNICATION REVIEW

There are a number of measurements of the Internet's basic properties
that are tremendously useful for researchers to know.  A solid
understanding of key Internet properties is useful for:

    * creating quality models to evaluate innovative new protocols,
      algorithms and architectures

    * understanding the overall context with which a new system will
      inevitably have to cope if/when deployed

    * gaining an appreciation for the variety and breadth of
      situations one may encounter when measuring the Internet

Yet, as the Internet has grown, many of these measurements are no
longer widely circulated -- often because they are viewed as
operational rather than of research interest.  Assumptions based on
dated information about the operational Internet are used every day
by researchers. Unreliable assumptions about the Internet's key
properties may lead to everything from wasted time in appreciating
the breadth of scenarios one must take into account in measurement
analysis to simulation studies that are not of practical import
because of the inaccurate models.

The goal of this special issue is to begin the practice of
periodically publishing measurement studies of the Internet that
concisely provide reliable, easily accessible information for
researchers to use and build on. Our aim is to complement traditional
measurement venues that emphasize new measurement techniques and
evaluations of new protocols and architectures, by updating the
community's working knowledge of the basic properties.

Examples of measurements that would be of interest are:

    * a breakdown of the types of bad/defective/broken DNS queries
      received at the typical root server;

    * how frequently the TCP/UDP checksum and the MAC-layer CRC
      disagree;

    * the distribution of traffic among different applications
      (perhaps, measured at different points in the network);

    * the ratio of local traffic to global traffic;

    * how often the forward and return paths of a TCP connection
      differ;

    * how often traffic is reordered;

    * the variation in BGP route prefixes advertised over the course
      of a typical minute, hour, day, week, and month;

    * distributions of round-trip times experienced in the network

Our expectation is that each paper will be short: a description of the
methodology by which the data was captured and where it was gathered,
a presentation of results, and where possible, a comparison of the
current results with those of prior years (and other researchers).
The focus of the papers should be on the data, rather than on
developing new methodologies.  We encourage authors to collaborate to
illustrate information from multiple vantage points in the network.
In addition, we especially solicit papers that are coupled to public
release of measurement datasets (even if anonymized in some form).

Our aim is to initiate a cycle whereby the community constantly
updates our collective understanding of the Internet's basic
properties.  Therefore, following the publication of this special
issue, CCR and Sigcomm will endeavor to continuously publish papers
on the Internet's basic properties to keep the community's
perspective fresh.

Please submit papers to the special issue by email to
   ccr-ivs@lists.csail.mit.edu

For further information and submission details please see
   http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/ccr/ivs
Please address questions about content or submission procedure to
   ccr-ivs@lists.csail.mit.edu

Schedule:

   Submissions due November 1, 2004
   Acceptance decisions December 3, 2004
   Publication January, 2005

Special Issue Editors

   Mark Allman, ICIR
   Craig Partridge, BBN