Subject: [edu-team] Fwd: Proposal to have a tutorial on basic statistics / tools specific to measurements

From: Mirjam Kuehne <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:53:14 +0200

Hi all,

Please see below a proposal for a tutorial (or maybe it is more a 
workshop?) at one of the next IETF meetings (he is suggesting London).

What do you all think?

Mirjam

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Proposal to have a tutorial on basic statistics / tools 
specific to measurements
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 19:29:02 +0530
From: Vinayak Hegde <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
CC: Al Morton <[email-masked]>

Hi Mirjam,

I had a short chat with you regarding conducting a training on
measurements and the statistics surrounding it. I have been
participating in the measurement working groups (IPPM[1], BMWG[2] and
now LMAP[3]). I am also a member of the PMOL (Performance metrics for
other layers)[4]. There has been quite a bit of interest in these
groups recently. for example LMAP recently chartered and there were
more than 10 drafts [5]. As such measurements is an important and
active part of the OPS area and is of interest to engineers,
regulators, policy and business.

I want to answer the following questions about proposing the training

Why we need this and why is it important ?

There are several new people participating in the IETF in these groups
and we are trying to attract more. As a part of PMOL, we have been
trying to recruit more people who can contribute to reviewing drafts
for performance considerations. There is a growing concern that we now
have wnough bandwidth and latency is becoming more and more of a
critical issue across groups (and hence measuring it and improving it
becomes a critical issues). However, to understand measurements, you
need to not only have a good grip of the protocols but also some
amount of understanding of underlying statistics and modeling.

For example, if we were to do a measurement, how many packets should
we send ? what should be the payload size and what should be the
duration between packets. How much loss are we okay with in case of
measurement to get a good idea. When we publish the measurements,
should we talk about the mean/median or distribution or both. etc.

As you can see in the above questions, we not only have to understand
the network (across layers) but must understand how to statistically
model these as well to make sure the measurements make sense.

Who will benefit and how ?

I can see several people benefiting from these.
1. Network engineers - these will get a good idea of how to do
measurement and how to model measurements and interpret results. This
will lead to better measurements.
2. Regulators - They will get an understanding of how there are
complex interatcions in the network and the statistics behind the
measurements. This will lead to better policy.
3. Network equipment manufacturers/vendors - They will get an idea of
how to use different knobs and levers so the network engineers can use
them effectively.

What should we cover ?

This is an area for discussion. As a start we can cover
1. Current work in the IETF for measurements
2. A Short intro to tcp models and cross-layer network concerns
3. Underlying statistics (relevant to measurements)
4. Implications for network engineers and policy

How we can we structure it ?

We can have a 1.5 / 2 hour Sunday session on this.

When can we schedule it ?

Tentatively assuming all goes well, we can target for the London
meeting assuming that we can get the course material ready by then.

Also we can reach out to several people for helping out with this -
People who are active on IPPM, LMAP, PMOL and BMWG. I can also help
out with the course material. Al (cc-ed here) will also help out with
the course material.

-- Vinayak

References:
1. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ippm/charter/
2. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/bmwg/charter/
3. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lmap/charter/
4. https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/pmol
5. https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/87/agenda/lmap/

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 08:03:30 +1200

Hi,

I think there is generally very poor knowledge and understanding
of statistics among most engineers, unless they've had more
mathematical education than average. I only ever had one statistics
course many years ago, but when teaching queueing theory, I found
that most students understood far less about statistics than me.

Whether this problem can fixed with a 90 minute tutorial is less
clear to me, but IMHO the claim that this is a topic that concerns
the whole Ops Area is valid.

I don't know Vinayak, but Al Morton is good value.

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 12/09/2013 20:53, Mirjam Kuehne wrote:
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