End-to-End Internet Packet Dynamics

First of all, I really like this study; the writing is straightforward, almost matter-of-fact and the paper is very clear about what its goals are, what the the contributions are, and where the data or analysis is not complete. This is a "pure" measurement paper in that it treats the results as interesting in and of themselves and does not lower itself by implementing something based on the results. This isn't sarcasm; I think this is actually a good thing in a measurement paper.

The analysis starts with a good data set; Paxson collects traces from many 100kb TCP sessions between 39 measurement points, geographically distributed across North America and Europe. To me, the most interesting results was the internet prevalence of packet reordering and damage in the traffic he observed. It wasn't possible to verify the checksum on the whole packets, and there may have been too much traffic to log all the packets, but it seems like this could easily be solved either by computing the checksum on the fly as packets come in, or else actually storing the whole trace; it may not have been possible in 1995 but would be no problem today.