Accurate and Low-cost Scheme for Network Path Delay Measurement

Path delay between two end-hosts not only is one of the key metric for evaluating the performance of a communication network, but also plays a significant role in several overlay network construction protocols, peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, etc. A popular example is P2P networks which need to build an overlay between peers in a way that minimizes the message exchange delay among the peers. Moreover, the clock error and the location error are the main factors to influence the measurement accuracy in the network path delay measurement. In this paper, we present a new scheme for accurate path delay measurement. In the scheme, Khlifi’s clock synchronization algorithm is used to eliminate the clock error between two end-hosts, and a kernel network driver (an intermediate driver based on Windows Network Driver Interface Specification) is utilized to eliminate the location error. The experimental results show that the new scheme can practically improve the measurement accuracy of network path delay, and make sure the measurement standard deviation to be lowered 10μs under different packet lengths and host loads. This scheme doesn't need additional softwares and hardwares, so it has lower cost and can be applied widely.