IEPM

Internet NREN performance from U.S. to world at the end of 2000

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Introduction

At the end of 2000 the
PingER project was monitoring, from 30 monitoring sites in 15 countries, over 600 host at 420 sites in 72 countries with over 3300 monitoring site remote site pairs. These countries hold over 79% of the world'spopulation and over 90% of the world's online population. The list of countries monitored also included all but 3 of the 42 countries with International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) membership. In our own community, over 50% of High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) collaborator sites are explicitly monitored as remote sites by PingER project. takine the major HENP experiments at the end of 2000 the percentage of sites monitored was: Atlas (37%), BaBar (68%), Belle (23%), CDF (73%), CMS (31%), D0 (60%), LEP (44%), Zeus (35%), PPDG (100%), RHIC(64%). Below is shown the deployment of PingER at this time. There were 2 archive sites, at SLAC and FNAL, and countries not monitored are shown in green. Also shown on the map are the Beacon sites that all monitoring sites monitor.
PingER deployment map
The most important single metric that we measure related to performance is the packet loss. We define a loss of >= 12% as being bad, 5% to 12% as being very poor, 2.5% to 5% as being poor, 1% to 2.5% as being acceptable and < 1% as being good. The rationale behind these deinitions can be found in Tutorial on Internet Monitoring & PingER at SLAC.

Performance from US to rest of the world

In the maps below, for each of the monitored countries there is a bar chart identifying the major performance characteristics of the country as seen from the U.S. The major performance characteristics are shown for the month of December October 1999. The values are medians for all the sites in the country. The blue bar on the legend is drawn with a height of 20 units, i.e. 20% for loss, 20/10 or 2 seconds for RTT and 20% unreachabilty.
Europe, Asia, Africa map Latin America map W. Pacific map

The table below shows in more detail the performance to the countries which from Jan 2000 thru November 2000 had a median very poor to bad packet loss. The table is ordered with the worst at the top. There may be someindication that performance some parts of South America (Argentina, Peru and Chile) may be improving, possibly as the Global crossing initiative reaches into those countries. In general, however, there does not appear to be much improvement in the year 2000 for the countries in the table.
table of countries with worst
performance

Performance from Switzerland to rest of the world

Similar maps are shown below for measurements made from CERN Switzerland. CERN does not measure as many sites. By comparing with the maps measured from the US, it is seen that, as expected, performance is better to Europe, but otheriwse it looks similar.
Europe, Asia, Africa map Latin America map W. Pacific map

Developed Nations

Plots of the Internet quality seen from (a href="http://www.es.net"> ESnet sites to many of the major developed regions of the world are shown below. The quality is defined following as the maximum TCP rate as defined in The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm by Mathis, Semke, Mahdavi & Ott in Computer Communication Review, 27(3), July 1997, which provides a short and useful formula for the upper bound on the transfer rate:
Rate < (MSS/RTT)*(1 / sqrt(p))
where:
Rate: is the TCP transfer rate
MSS: is the maximum segment size (fixed for each Internet path, typically 1460 bytes)
RTT: is the round trip time (as measured by TCP)
p: is the packet loss rate. The y axis is on a log scale so a straight line is an exponetial. It is seen that performance is improving, faster in N. America (bear in mind these measurements are made from the US).
performance to developed regions
Comparing the performance of major resaerch and education networks in the US seen below, it is apparent that performance (packet loss) is good (< 1%), ESnet to ESnet is best and is holding under 0.1%, .edu to .edu sites (most of the .edu site measured are on Internet 2) are improving more rapidly but still are about 4 times worse than ESnet, and XIWT sites (70% .com) are also improving but about 5-10 times worse than ESnet.
ESnet vs I2 vs XIWT

Performance from the rest of the world to India

Below is seen a chart of packet loss measured from several sites around the world to sites in India. The Indian sites are TIFR/Mumbai, Ernet/Upune, Sara, and IISC. The performance in general is seen to be poor to bad.
Loss world to India 2000

Performance vs population

Using the population figures in the NUA Internet Surveys it is interesting to see how performance (packet loss) seen from the US compares to the number of people online in the country. Such a chart is shown below as a scatter plot excluding N. America and W. Europe. It is seen that Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, S. Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Estonia and Israel all have over 15% of their populations online and have good to acceptable performance. Russia, Latvia, Maylasia and Indonesia on the other hand all have bad performance.
Performance vs online %
The chart below shows the fractions of the world's population that have various levels of Internet performance as seen from the US. The pie chart with it shows the fraction of the world's population with a given Internet performance seen from the US. The table shows similar information but more numerically.
chart of population by performance pie chart of performance 
by population table of 
performance seen from US by population

Summary


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Created January 29, 2000.
URL: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/tools.html
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