His research interests are in performance evaluation, focusing on parallel and networked computer systems. In the networking arena, he has worked on characterizing the Internet and the World Wide Web. He has explored the presence and implications of self-similarity and heavy-tailed distributions in network traffic and Web workloads. He has also investigated the implications of Web workloads for the design of scalable and cost-effective Web servers. In addition he has made numerous contributions to Internet measurement and modeling; and he has examined the impact of network properties on the design of protocols and the construction of statistical models.
Professor Crovella is co-author of Internet Measurement: Infrastructure, Traffic, and Applications (Wiley Press, 2006) and is the author of over one hundred papers on networking and computer systems. He holds five patents deriving from his research. Since 2007 he has been Chair of ACM SIGCOMM. He is an editor for Computer Communication Review, and a past editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Computer Networks and IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was the Program Chair for the 2003 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, and the General Chair of the 2005 Passive and Active Measurement Workshop. His paper (with Azer Bestavros) "Self-Similarity in World Wide Web Traffic: Evidence and Possible Causes" is listed by Citeseer as one of the most cited papers in Computer Science, and his paper (with Paul Barford) "Critical Path Analysis of TCP Transactions" was nominated for the 2002 William Bennett Prize, given annually to the best paper published in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He has given numerous invited talks and tutorials, and is a founder of and consultant to companies involved in Internet technologies.