The time for a packet to be received at a destination since it was sent from a source. Total delay can be separated into the following components: the time it takes for the source to send it, the time it takes the packet to travel along the physical links that make up the end-to-end path, the time it takes to pass through routers between those links and the time required for the server to process an incoming packet.
Published in Chapter:
Performance Measurement of Computer Networks
Federico Montesino Pouzols (University of Seville, Spain), Angel Barriga Barros (University of Seville, Spain), Diego R. Lopez (RedIRIS, Spain), and Santiago Sánchez-Solano (CSIC - Scientific Research Council, Spain)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-885-7.ch160
Abstract
In this article, general findings about Internet traffic models are first reviewed, with emphasis on two important invariants or characteristics that are observed with some reproducibility and independently of the precise settings of the network under consideration: self-similarity and heavy-tail marginal distributions. Then metrics and measurement techniques and tools will be discussed. This article deals with generic network performance measurement systems and outlines models, measurement techniques and tools that measure performance at the network and transport layers and can thus be applied regardless of the application layer protocols being employed. These systems are useful for analyzing performance of any network application and are an important foundational tool for enabling advanced virtual organizations (Foster, Kesselman, & Tuecke, 2001). Note, however, that application-level (or specific application details aware) measurements are commonly needed to complement generic tools so as to achieve a clear understanding of overall applications performance, which cannot be synthesized from lower level data with ease (Andrews, Cao, & McGowan, 2006).