[ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[Greg Skinner]

On Apr 21, 2026, at 1:04 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Back in the ARPANET era, there were lots of analytical studies of the mechanisms of packet networks.  Lots of measurements were also taken, to compare real-world behavior to the predictions of analytical models (such as Kleinrock's work at UCLA, and later BBN's work to monitor the ARPANET as it grew and use the data gathered to modify the internal mechanisms based on operational behavior.
> 
> Have such theoretical analyses and operational experience ever been applied to The Internet?    For example, the internal mechanisms in the ARPANET based routing decisions on measurements of transit time for packets to traverse the ARPANET.   For pragmatic reasons, that was not feasible in the early Internet, and routing decisions were based on "hops" instead of time.  Maybe that's still true?
> 
> Was the Internet ever analyzed mathematically as the ARPANET was? Or were (are?) measurements of operational behavior used (or even collected?) in some way to influence technical evolution? Personally I haven't seen any discussions of such things but I also haven't been looking.   But I think it's an important aspect of Internet History.
> 
> /Jack
> 

CAIDA <https://www.caida.org/> does many types of studies.  Their overview page <https://www.caida.org/catalog/datasets/overview/> provides links to examples.  Some, like this analysis of how ISP competition affects autonomous system path quality and ISP profits, are quite mathematical, IMO. [1]

--gregbo

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.06811