Every Packet Counts: Loss and Reordering Identification and Its Application in Delay Measurement

Delay is an important metric to understand and improve system performance. While existing approaches focus on aggregated delay statistics in pre-programmed granularity and provide results such as average and deviation, those approaches may not provide fine-grained delay measurement and thus may miss important delay characteristics. For example, delay anomaly, which is a critical system performance indicator, may not be captured by coarse-grained approaches. We propose a new measurement structure design called order preserving aggregator OPA. Based on OPA, we can efficiently encode and recover the ordering and loss information by exploiting inherent data characteristics. We then propose a two-layer design to convey both ordering and time stamp, and efficiently derive per-packet delay/loss measurement. We evaluate our approach both analytically and experimentally. The results show that our approach can achieve per-packet delay measurement with an average of per-packet relative error at 2%, and an average of aggregated relative error at $10^{-5}$, while introducing additional communication overhead in the order of $10^{-4}$ in terms of number of packets. While at a low data rate, the computation overhead of OPA is acceptable. Reducing the computation and communication overhead under high data rate, to make OPA more practical in real applications, will be our future direction.