Looking for Errors TCP Misses

Jack Fitzgerald, Anju Gopinath, Logan Cadman, Sepideh Abdollah, Susmit Shannigrahi, Craig Partridge

Abstract: Inspired by prior work suggesting undetected errors were becoming a problem on the Internet, we set out to create a measurement system to detect errors that the TCP checksum missed. We designed a client-server framework in which the servers sent known files to clients. We then compared the received data with the original file to identify undetected errors introduced by the network. We deployed this measurement framework on various public testbeds. Over the course of 9 months, we transferred a total of 26 petabytes of data. Scaling the measurement framework to capture a large number of errors proved to be a challenge. This paper focuses on the challenges encountered during the deployment of the measurement system. We also present the interim results, which suggest that the error problems seen in prior works may be caused by two distinct processes: (1) errors that slip past TCP and (2) file system failures. The interim results also suggest that the measurement system needs to be adjusted to collect exabytes of measurement data, rather than the petabytes that prior studies predicted.

External IDs:dblp:conf/noms/FitzgeraldGCASP25