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Islamabad's intra-city traffic experiences multiple hops (within a few square kms) from source to destination. Moreover outbound Islamabad traffic also experiences a slightly indirect route (multiple hops). Traffic passing between Peshawar and Lahore shows a much direct route. This can be noticed by looking at LHR-ISL, ISL-PSH and LHR-PSH alpha values. Among these three LHR-PSH is the highest (indicative of directness) despite the fact that it passes through Islamabad.
UETTaxila case study
UETTaxila showed high RTT and unreachability since the node at UET, Taxila came online. A complete case study on this can be found here.
Conclusions
- 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 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.
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