Introduction
This was a Skype meeting.
The attendess were Abdulah from UM, nara and Johari from UNIMAS, Arshad and Anjum from NUST and Les from SLAC.
We first went round and each identified himself so we knew each others roles and also were familiar with each others voice.
Potential Project
During a recent visit to SLAC Arshad and Les discussed the how to take forward the NUST/SLAC collaboration. Funding for this originally came from a Pakistan/US research proposal and subsequently from the Pakistan Higher Education Commission (HEC). With the new government and HEC re-organization this funding was suddenly reduced. Despite this the collaboration is active and NUST has funding to send a graduate student as a visiting scientist to SLAC for a year to continue the collaboration. An idea is to extend the collaboration to include Malaysia and in particular to UNIMAS and UM Kuala Lumpur. The question then becomes how is this useful to Malaysia.
An initial project would be to put together an active end-to-end monitoring infrastructure for major Malaysian MYREN connected sites. This would be based on PingER and follow the recent deployment made of PERN connected sites in Pakistan. Les went over some of the major benefits obtained in Pakistan from analyzing the monitoring data.
- One was identifying that though the PERN backbone (155Mbps in 2006) was functioning well and lightly loaded, the last mile was typically heavily congested with thousands of users sharing an inadequate Mbps link. As a result the PERN upgrade featured higher capacity to the sites.
- More recently we were able to identify and quantify the unreliability of sites caused by power outages and lack of alternate power.
- Most recently connectivity between PERN connected and commercial ISP connected hosts since there is no neutral Internet Exchange Point in Pakistan so the peering goes through France. This not only increases International transit costs but led to long delays and poor performance.
A further major benefit is the provision of a repository of historical and current measurements of multiple metrics (e.g. round trip times, losses, jitter, unavailability, anomalies such as duplicate packet and our of order packets etc.) between a wide set of well known hosts. These can be mined and used to derive other metrics such as throughput, directness of connection, Mean Opinion Score (MOS). This is a rich source for research of issues such as statistical analysis identifying and reporting anomalies in performance, denial of service attacks etc.