A simulation study of the measurement of queueing delay over end-to-end paths

Determining the qualitative States-of-the-Internet requires an accurate knowledge of queueing delay over an end-to-end path. However, the measurement of queueing delay in a large network is still considered a complex and open problem. Existing schemes that measure queueing delay compensate for this complexity using a high infrastructural support and administrative access to the path under test even though their feasibility and accuracy on the Internet are low. In this article, we propose an active scheme, called COMPRESS: COMpound Probe compRESSion, to measure queueing delay on all routers over an end-to-end path. The proposed scheme performs per-hop measurement using UDP-based probing packets. It is both simple and self-sufficient in comparison to the existing schemes. We have implemented the proposed scheme in a simulation environment to present a controlled performance evaluation under different levels (e.g., light, moderate, and heavy) and types (e.g., symmetric and asymmetric) of queueing delays over single- and multiple-hop paths. Our simulation results show that the scheme is sensitive to the induced queueing delays and consistently produces a high measurement accuracy. Overall, the scheme has an average measurement error of around 20% or below over the simulated paths.