From Paris to Tokyo: on the suitability of ping to measure latency

Cristel Pelsser , Luca Cittadini , Stefano Vissicchio and Randy Bush

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Abstract

Monitoring Internet performance and measuring user quality of experience are drawing increased attention from both research and industry. To match this interest, large-scale measurement infrastructures have been constructed. We believe that this effort must be combined with a critical review and calibrarion of the tools being used to measure performance.In this paper, we analyze the suitability of ping for delay measurement. By performing several experiments on different source and destination pairs, we found cases in which ping gave very poor estimates of delay and jitter as they might be experienced by an application. In those cases, delay was heavily dependent on the flow identifier, even if only one IP path was used. For accurate delay measurement we propose to replace the ping tool with an adaptation of paris-traceroute which supports delay and jitter estimation, without being biased by per-flow network load balancing.

Publication Details

Publication Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
October 2013
Published In
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference IMC
Pages
427--432
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Location
Barcelona, Spain
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1145/2504730.2504765

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{Pelsser2013,
	title        = {From Paris to Tokyo: on the suitability of ping to measure latency},
	author       = {Cristel Pelsser and Luca Cittadini and Stefano Vissicchio and Randy Bush},
	year         = 2013,
	month        = oct,
	booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference {IMC}},
	location     = {Barcelona, Spain},
	publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
	address      = {New York, NY, USA},
	series       = {IMC '13},
	pages        = {427--432},
	doi          = {10.1145/2504730.2504765},
	isbn         = 9781450319539,
	url          = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2504730.2504765},
	abstract     = {Monitoring Internet performance and measuring user quality of experience are drawing increased attention from both research and industry. To match this interest, large-scale measurement infrastructures have been constructed. We believe that this effort must be combined with a critical review and calibrarion of the tools being used to measure performance.In this paper, we analyze the suitability of ping for delay measurement. By performing several experiments on different source and destination pairs, we found cases in which ping gave very poor estimates of delay and jitter as they might be experienced by an application. In those cases, delay was heavily dependent on the flow identifier, even if only one IP path was used. For accurate delay measurement we propose to replace the ping tool with an adaptation of paris-traceroute which supports delay and jitter estimation, without being biased by per-flow network load balancing.},
	groups       = {International Conferences},
	keywords     = {ping, delay, jitter, load balancing},
	numpages     = 6
}

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