On measuring the end-to-end packet delay and its dynamics modeling using system identification

摘要

Understanding the end-to-end packet delay dynamics of the Internet is of crucial importance since it directly affects the QoS (Quality of Services) of realtime services, and it enables us to design an efficient congestion control mechanism. In this paper, we measure the end-to-end packet delay of the Internet, and build a model representing its dynamics using the system identification. We first measure, as the input and output data for the system identification, the packet inter-departure time from a source host and the corresponding round-trip time measured by the source host. ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) is utilized to measure the round-trip time for each packet. We next model the network, seen by a specific source host, as a dynamic SISO (Single-Input and Single-Output) system. Namely, the input to the system is the packet inter-departure time from the source host, and the output from the system is the round-trip time variation between two adjacent packets. Using measurement results obtained from several network environments. we show how accurately the packet delay dynamics of the Internet can be modeled with the system identification.