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- An extensive end-to-end network monitoring infrastructure has been set up for PERN connected universities in Pakistan. Over the last year its has grown from 30 monitoring-remote node pairs to over 500 covering most of the major universities in the main regions of Pakistan.
- At some sites, installation and start up of monitoring hosts was delayed by weak local support.
- There is a great deal of variability in the reliability (unreachability) of hosts. Much of this is due to loss of power. An effort needs to be made to understand and improve power reliability and the provision of backup for several sites.
- Given the measured MOS, VoIP tools such as Skype should work well between PERN connected hosts.
- The poor throughput performance to Quetta is understandable. More work need to be done to understand why Karachi looks so bad.
- The low values of alpha lead to the conclusion that there may be a lot of indirect routing in the Islamabad region. Further work with PERN is required to see if this can be remedied.
- The poor throughput performance to Quetta is understandable. More work need to be done to understand why Karachi looks so bad. configuration of the PERN network naturally changes with time. For example compare the maps: http://pern.edu.pk/images/lapopsislamabad.jpg and http://pern.edu.pk/images/home/download/hld.png where for example CIIT (COMSATS) is show as connected to the QAU router in one and the HEC router in the other. To keep an independent record of the topology we need to measure traceroutes on a regular basis and PERN needs to provide the addresses and locations of the routers.
Acknowledge
We acknowledge the patient and persistent efforts by Muhammad Zeeshan and Fahad Gilani of NUST to spearhead the installations of PingER at the various sites. Anjum Naveed and Adnan Kiani led the efforts at NUST. The PingER data was collected and analyzed by Les Cottrell of SLAC and Amber Zeb and Sadia Rehman of NUST. A few PingER tools and procedures were enhanced at NUST by Zafar Gilani. The PingER map tool was developed by Faisal Zahid while at SLAC and turned out to be extremely effective in drilling down and understanding the connections. The Smokeping tool was developed by Fahad Satti while at SLAC. Umar Kalim of Virginia Tech provided support for this year and has been spearheading the effort for the last several years. We also acknowledge the continued encouragement and support from Arshad Ali of NUST.