First International Workshop
on Protocols for Fast
Long-Distance Networks

Technical
Program

Committees

Submission
Instructions

Registration

Important
Dates

Practical Info

PFLDnet 2004

Fast long-distance networks (i.e., networks operating at 622 Mbit/s, 2.5 Gbit/s, or 10 Gbit/s and spanning several countries or states) were confined to network operators and ISPs until recently. They are now becoming a mainstream market. More and more researchers now routinely transfer between 10 GB and 1 TB of data over gigabit networks (e.g., users remotely involved in the BaBar experiment at SLAC or the LHC experiment at CERN). Application domains for such massive transfers include data-intensive Grids (e.g., in Particle Physics, Earth Observation, Bioinformatics, and Radio Astronomy), database mirroring for Web sites (e.g., in e-commerce), and push-based Web cache updates.

Although the network infrastructure is now in place, or will soon be, the transport and application protocols available to date perform rather poorly over such networks. Current versions of TCP, for instance, recover very slowly from packet loss when the RTT, the congestion window, and the link capacity are large. A number of research teams have begun investigating these protocol issues. Some work on simulations, others use real networks. But there is currently little cross-pollination between them, especially between the U.S. and Europe.

This workshop will be an opportunity for researchers around the world to discuss and exchange experience on the performance of transport and application protocols (TCP, UDP, HTTP, FTP, etc.) over fast long-distance networks. This year, a particular emphasis will be on TCP congestion control. Each day will start with a plenary talk and end with a panel. In between, formal presentations of papers will be followed by extensive and informal Q&A sessions.

In order to facilitate discussions, attendance will be limited to 60 participants and papers will be available online.

The topics of this workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

• protocol issues in fast long-distance networks
• experiments on real networks and actual measurements
• simulation-based results
• TCP enhancements and their comparison
• fairness
• effects of shaping on TCP and UDP traffic
• effects of striping and multistreaming
• experience with different types of hardware (PCs, routers, switches, Gigabit Ethernet cards, etc.)