Inferring Network Impact Factors: Applying Mixed Distribution to Measured RTTs

Yasuhiro SATO  Shingo ATA  Ikuo OKA  Chikato FUJIWARA 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications  Vol.E92-B  No.4  pp.1233-1243
Publication Date: 2009/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Network
Keyword: 
delay characteristics,  round trip time (RTT),  mixed distribution,  network behavior, 

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Summary: 
The end-to-end round trip time (RTT) is one of the most important communication characteristics for Internet applications. From the viewpoint of network operators, RTT may also become one of the important metrics to understand the network conditions. Given this background, we should know how a factor such as a network incident influences RTTs. It is obvious that two or more factors may interfere in the observed delay characteristics, because packet transmission delays in the Internet are strongly dependent on the time-variant condition of the network. In this paper, we propose a modeling method by using mixed distribution which enables us to express delay characteristic more accurately where two or more factors exist together. And, we also propose an inferring method of network behavior by decomposition of the mixed distribution based on modeling results. Furthermore, in experiments we investigate the influence caused by each network impact factor independently. Our proposed method can presume the events that occur in a network from the measurements of RTTs by using the decomposition of the mixed distribution.