No subject

Engineering.

Internet providers no longer compete on the simple grounds of connectivity. It
should be their desire to provide reasonable predictable performance given
that demands for quality of service guarantees are growing.  However, this
entails understanding a number of things about IP traffic which are difficult
to capture. The Internet is a multi-administrative system with a high degree
of heterogeneity of technology, provisioning, users, applications,
technologies and so on. The traffic mix that it is carrying is extremely
complex and poorly understood resulting in a traffic matrix that is
multi-dimensional, made out of many applications and usage patterns, with many
complex, multi-time-frame feedback loops.

Characterizing the traffic matrix requires among others understanding of the
topology and its evolution, the routing system at the intra-domain and
inter-domain level, the end-to-end protocol behavior, user behavior, and 
application behaviour. To do this in a rapidly evolving system requires
for example intelligent metering and sampling, statistical analysis, as well
as a range of novel approaches to understanding users' and providers' rights
to privacy. Providing input to the understanding of the traffic and its
evolution can lead to provisioning, both for reasoanbly predictable best
effort services, but also in the future for some novel network services
perhaps based on differentiation and so forth. The work is complicated by the
exponential growth in speed as well as size of the network, requiring ever
smarter packet capture and sampling methodologies. Also the asymmetric nature
of inter-domain routes means that matching measured traffic to the actual
topology is a non-trivial task. Already we are faced with a problem far harder
than the teletraffic engineering problem in telephony networks of the past.

This special issue of ETT is aimed at capturing in one place some of
the state-of-the-art work in measurement, analysis and provisioning
work that is going on in the research, development and services
communities. The topics to be included in this issue are at least the
following

- Traffic measurement
- Statistical techniques for sampling
- Topology inference or discovery
- Route inference
- Intra-domain and inter-domain routing system 
- Traffic matrix
- Provisioning algorithms and systems
- Metering, provisioning and differentiation
- Internet transport protocol source models
- Internet application source models
- Internet usage models
- Interaction of feedback loops

Prospective authors should send 5 (five) copies of their papers to one
of the guest editors listed below. Electronic submission of postscript
or PDF files is encouraged (zipped, gzipped, bzipped, zip).

Submission of Manuscripts: 	May 31, 2001
Notification of Acceptance: 	September 30, 2001
Submission of Final Manuscript:	November 15, 2001
Publication Data:		Jan-Feb 2002 (Issue No. 1)

Guest Editors:

Anja Feldmann			Jon Crowcroft
Informatik, 			Computer Science, 
Universitaet des Saarlandes, 	UCL
Postfach 15 11 50, 66041	Gower St, 
Saarbruecken, Germany		London, WC1E 6BT, UK
+49 681 302-6540 (Office) 	tel +44 20 7679 7296
+49 681 302-6542 (fax) 		fax +44 20 7387 1397
anja at cs.uni-sb.de		J.Crowcroft at cs.ucl.ac.uk