Alberto Medina, Mark Allman, Sally Floyd. Measuring Interactions Between Transport Protocols and Middleboxes. ACM SIGCOMM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference, Taormina, Sicily, Italy, October 2004.
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Abstract:

In this paper we explore the current network environment with respect to how the network's evolution ultimately impacts end-to-end protocols. The traditional end-to-end assumptions about the Internet are increasingly challenged by the introduction of intermediary network elements (middleboxes) that intentionally or unintentionally prevent or alter the behavior of end-to-end communications. This paper provides measurement results showing the impact of the current network environment on a number of traditional and proposed protocol mechanisms (e.g., Path MTU Discovery, Explicit Congestion Notification, etc.). We present results of mea- surements taken using an active measurement framework to study web servers. We analyze our results to gain further understanding of the differences between the behavior of the Internet in theory versus the behavior we observed through measurements. In addition, these measurements can be used to guide the definition of more realistic Internet modeling scenarios.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{MAF04,
    author    =        "Alberto Medina and Mark Allman and Sally Floyd",
    title     =        "{Measuring Interactions Between Transport Protocols and Middleboxes}",
    booktitle =        "ACM SIGCOMM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference",
    year      =        2004,
    month     =        oct,
}

An expanded version of this paper appears in CCR in April, 2005.