Conclusions and Future Work

$\parbox{0.2in}{\mbox{}}$$\parbox{5.25in}{\begin{singlespace}\textit{\textbf{real}: (2b3) exis... ...ing properties that deviate from an ideal, law, or standard.}\end{singlespace}}$$\parbox{0.2in}{\mbox{}}$
$\parbox{5.25in}{\begin{flushright}--- \textsc{{Merrian--Webster English Dictionary}}\end{flushright}}$

$\parbox{0.2in}{\mbox{}}$$\parbox{5.25in}{\begin{singlespace}\textit{There are sadistic scient... ...hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.}\end{singlespace}}$$\parbox{0.2in}{\mbox{}}$
$\parbox{5.25in}{\begin{flushright}--- \textsc{{Marie Curie (1867--1934)}}\end{flushright}}$

This dissertation proposed and evaluated a new approach for generating realistic traffic in networking experiments. Our construction relied on several components to form a coherent solution to this problem:

1. The a-b-t model of source-level behavior, which provides a generic but detailed way of describing source-level behavior that is applicable to any Internet application.
2. An efficient measurement method for accurately translating the packet header trace of any arbitrary TCP connection into its a-b-t connection vector, even in the presence of packet reordering and retransmission.
3. The source-level trace replay method for generating traffic in a closed-loop manner, which provides a way of introducing fully reproducible synthetic traffic in networking experiments.
4. The ability to directly compare original traffic and its source-level replay, after incorporating network parameters also derived from packet header analysis. Such a comparison enables us to assess the realism of the synthetic traffic.
5. A method for resampling a-b-t connection vectors that supports both the introduction of controlled variability in the generated traffic and the predictable scaling of the offered load.

The rest of this chapter discusses these components^8.1, highlighting some concrete contributions and open questions, which could be the subject of future work. Our focus is on the larger scheme of things, so we refer the reader to the summaries of each chapter for additional findings and possible refinement of our methodology.