Re: Richard Bennett, NANOG posting, and Integrity

[Bill Woodcock <woody () pch net>]

On Jul 28, 2014, at 9:52 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra () baylink com> wrote:
> > > It is not representative of the actual traffic flows on the Internet.
> >
> > Traffic flows on the Internet is a different survey of a different thing.
>
> He didn't mean "TCP Flows", I don't think; he was simply -- as I 
> understood him -- talking about the 40,000ft view of connections between
> pieces of the Internet. I don't expect your dataset to have flow-level data, and I don't think
> he did either.

How else do you get a representative measurement of “actual traffic flows on the Internet?”

We’ve got adjacency information.  Telegeography has hand-waving 40,000 ft. flow estimates in the form of different 
widths of arrows on a map.  But if you want to know how large actual flows of data are between two regions of the 
Internet, and you can’t actually instrument the whole Internet, you need two things: (1) a broad and representative 
sampling of flow data, and (2) a complete measurement of a few portions of the network that are represented in the 
sampled set.  That gives you a horizontal and a vertical view, from which you can extrapolate to a whole, or any other 
part, with some minor assurance of reasonability.

If someone has an easier methodology to suggest, that still produces usable results, I’m all ears.

> it isn't really germane to the conversation we're having.

I thought I’d made that point?

                                -Bill

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