Abstract
RTT has been widely used as a metric for peer/server selection. However, many applications involving closest peer/server selection such as streaming, tree-based multicast services and other UDP and TCP based services would benefit more from knowing one-way delay (OWD) rather than RTT. In fact, RTT is frequently used as as an approximate solution to infer forward and reverse delays by many protocols and applications which assume forward and reverse delay to be equal to half of RTT.
In this paper, we compare and contrast one-way delays and corresponding RTTs using a wide selection of routes in the Internet. We first measure the extent and severeness of asymmetry in forward and reverse OWD in the Internet. We then attempt to isolate the causes of OWD asymmetry by correlating OWD asymmetry with the route asymmetry. Finally, we investigate the dynamics of delay asymmetry. We find there exists a weak correlation between the fluctuation of RTT and OWD but a strong correlation between OWD change and the corresponding route change.
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Pathak, A., Pucha, H., Zhang, Y., Hu, Y.C., Mao, Z.M. (2008). A Measurement Study of Internet Delay Asymmetry. In: Claypool, M., Uhlig, S. (eds) Passive and Active Network Measurement. PAM 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4979. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79232-1_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79232-1_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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