Analysis of Time-Varying Characteristics of Internet End-to-End Network Delay

Abstract

Network delay has great influence on application performance. It changes dynamically due to the instability of Internet routing and dynamic traffic load. Understanding the time-varying characteristics of Internet end-to-end network delay is important for network management and optimization. In this paper, we propose an analysis method by decomposing end-to-end delay into two components: basic delay and delay jitter. We propose an algorithm to extract the basic delay from a measured end-to-end delay time series. The algorithm is applied on a data set gathered by probing about 1000 destinations for one day. The statistical characteristics of basic delay are analyzed. The experimental results show that the intervals between two successive changes of basic delay follow the normal distribution approximately, which hints that the change of Internet end-to-end path may follow the same normal distribution, too. Our findings are helpful for improving network performance and detecting network anomalies.

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No.61070199, 61103188, 61103189 and 61100223, and Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No.11JJ7003.