Shishir Biyyala will be defending his Masters Thesis, "Network Emulation at Receiver (NEAR): A Tool to Evaluate TCP Performance of real Web Servers", on Friday, April 12 at 4 p.m. in 211 Schorr Center. His committee members are Lisong Xu, Ying Lu, and Ziguo Zhong. Xu also advised the project.
Abstract
A major share of today’s Internet traffic is due to World Wide Web (WWW). Webservers orchestrate web traffic using HTTP, which in turn depends upon TCP for reliability. Evaluation of TCP implementations in web servers is essential to understand web server performance. This project presents a user-level network emulator called Network Emulation At Receiver (NEAR) for evaluating and comparing TCP performance of public web servers. NEAR’s architecture is fundamentally different from those of existing network emulators such as Dummynet and NetEm. These tools are kernel-bound and dependent upon actual network conditions. User-level implementation at receiver node facilitates NEAR to be independent of actual conditions. NEAR focuses on two metrics – round trip time and packet loss rate, generating multiple network scenarios for a single client-server interaction.