Future Work

In this section, we describe some possible future improvements to the nettimer implementation. One improvement would be to determine what the optimal weighting of components in the filtering algorithm (Section 2.2.3) is. Another improvement would be to allow runtime choice of flow definition (Section 3.1), so that we could measure bandwidth behind NAT gateways. Another improvement would be to allow distributed packet capture servers to randomly sample traffic to reduce the amount of bandwidth that packet reports consume. Finally, we could add an active probing component like [Sav99] which can cause large packets to flow in both directions from hosts without special measurement software and can cause prompt acknowledgements to flow back to the sender. The pathrate [DRM01] tool shows that active packet pair can be very accurate.