The paper, "End-to-End Internet Packet Dynamics", seems to make a great contribution to the study of networks. It applies a new method for analysing packet dynamics, which proves very effective. The new method is to install a service on selected 'ends' of the network and then to pass TCP traffic between each pair of 'ends'. Obviously much can be discovered using this approach. So, is there an even better way to study packet dynamics? In particular, is there a method which scales better than this one, which is quadratic in the number of 'ends'? Because this measurement method scales poorly, it necessarily limits the amount of measuring which can be done. Is it possible to make similar measurements in such a way as to support large-scale, real-time measurements? For example, How effectively can a single router be used to deduce or infer the dynamics of packets passing through it?
Since I study Natural Language Processing (NLP), I have been looking for connections between NLP and the internet. The questions asked above suggest a possible connection. In NLP, we are typically trying to infer things by observing only the traffic that flows between two or more people. The traffic I refer to is language, speech or text for example. We typically do not have direct access to the thought processes and intents of the people who either send or receive the traffic. These people are like the 'ends' of the network. In NLP, rather than making end-to-end measurements, as done in this paper, we do our measuring from the middle.
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