In an ideal world the need to provide data communications between facilities separated by a large ocean would be filled simply. One would estimate the bandwidth requirement, place an order with a global telecommunications company, then just hook up routers on each end and start using the link. Our experience was considerably more painful, primarily due to three factors: 1) The behavior of some ...

The growing importance of real-time computing in numerous applications poses problems for network architectures, especially safety-critical Wide Area Networks (WANs). Assessing network performance in safety-critical real-time systems is difficult, and suggests the use of both human and technical performance criteria because of the importance of both dimensions in safety-critical settings. This ...

A substantial fraction of all network tra c today comes from applications in which clients retrieve objects from servers. The caching of objects in locations \close" to clients is an important technique for reducing both network tra c and response time for such applications. In this paper we consider the bene ts of associating caches with switching nodes throughout the network, rather than in a...