Multicast-based inference of network-internal delay distributions

Packet delay greatly influences the overall performance of network applications. It is therefore important to identify causes and location of delay performance degradation within a network. Existing techniques, largely based on end-to-end delay measurements of unicast traffic, are well suited to monitor and characterize the behavior of particular end-to-end paths. Within these approaches, however, it is not clear how to apportion the variable component of end-toend delay as queueing delay at each link along a path. Moreover, they suffer of scalability issues if a significant portion of a network is of interest. In this paper, we show how end-to-end measurements of multicast traffic can be used to infer the packet delay distribution and utilization on each link of a logical multicast tree. The idea, recently introduced in [4, 5] is to exploit the inherent correlation between multicast observations to infer performance of paths between branch points in a tree spanning a multicast source...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TON
• Authors: Francesco Lo Presti, Nick G. Duffield, Joseph Horowitz, Donald F. Towsley
• Keywords: End-to-end Delay Measurements, Multicast, Packet Delay, TON 2002