Metrics and Measurements

In 1997, Vern Paxson published a seminal paper on Internet measurement. His publication, titled "End-to-End Internet Packet Dynamics", attempted to characterize the Internet's behavior in terms of concise metrics: out-of-order delivery, packet corruption, bottleneck bandwidth, and packet loss.

Internet measurement effectively "bridges the gap" between theory and practice. Paxson's measurements demonstrated how common assumptions in hardware and protocols were often violated. That gave protocol and hardware designers the information needed to optimize existing protocols and hardware. As the Internet is a dynamically changing system, it must be continually measured in order to evaluate whether its architecture is still sufficient for its load and topology.