Hop-by-hop versus end-to-end active measurements

Abstract

In packet-switching networks, some performance characteristics can be estimated by end-to-end active measurements, i.e. sending probe packets from end hosts. There are different end-to-end measurement techniques to estimate one-way delay and different types of bandwidth. Nevertheless they do not always give accurate results, only work under limited conditions and have disadvantages which we summarize based on several research works [3,10,12]. We propose hop-by-hop active measurement methods to measure bandwidth and one-way delay. The concept of proposed hop-by-hop methods is that not only the end hosts, but nodes along a network path are also involved in measurements. In this paper, new necessary services are also proposed, with which we can apply hop-by-hop methods. Our performance evaluation shows that despite having to implement new services in every node, these services help network performance analysts and applications measure bandwidth and one-way delay faster and more accurately. Our work is an attempt to take part in creating and deploying infrastructure to support better measurement on the Internet.