In partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science
Amitoj Singh
will defend his thesis
Reconstruction of application layer
message sequences by network monitoring
Abstract
Monitoring communication is central
to the development and tuning of parallel and distributed applications.
Available tools for network monitoring typically capture the network
traffic at TCP or IP layers, but a software developer is most
interested in the message exchange sequence between pairs of nodes
executing the application. However, capturing application level traffic
requires instrumenting the application code, which is cumbersome and
not even an option in most cases. We present a procedure that
reconstructs the application layer message sequences by analyzing TCP
layer traffic. The basic idea is that, since TCP traffic is
constructed with a well-defined procedure from application traffic, it
should be possible to reconstruct application message exchanges from
TCP segments. We demonstrate that the procedure is effective, although
not perfect, by extensive experimentation with NASA's NAS parallel
benchmarks.