On calibrating measurements of packet transit times

  • Authors:
  • Vern Paxson

  • Affiliations:
  • Network Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley

  • Venue:
  • SIGMETRICS '98/PERFORMANCE '98 Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

We discuss the problem of detecting errors in measurements of the total delay experienced by packets transmitted through a wide-area network. We assume that we have measurements of the transmission times of a group of packets sent from an originating host, A, and a corresponding set of measurements of their arrival times at their destination host, B, recorded by two separate clocks. We also assume that we have a similar series of measurements of packets sent from B to A (as might occur when recording a TCP connection), but we do not assume that the clock at A is synchronized with the clock at B, nor that they run at the same frequency. We develop robust algorithms for detecting abrupt adjustments to either clock, and for estimating the relative skew between the clocks. By analyzing a large set of measurements of Internet TCP connections, we find that both clock adjustments and relative skew are sufficiently common that failing to detect them can lead to potentially large errors when analyzing packet transit times. We further find that synchronizing clocks using a network time protocol such as NTP does not free them from such errors.