Quantile sampling for practical delay monitoring in Internet backbone networks

Point-to-point delay is an important network performance measure as it captures service degradations caused by various events. We study how to measure and report delay in a concise and meaningful way for an ISP, and how to monitor it efficiently. We analyze various measurement intervals and potential metric definitions. We find that reporting high quantiles (between 0.95 and 0.99) every 10–30 min as the most effective way to summarize the delay in an ISP. We then propose an active probing scheme to estimate a high quantile with bounded error. We show that only a small number of probes are sufficient to provide an accurate estimate. We validate the proposed delay monitoring technique on real data collected on the Sprint IP backbone network. To make our work complete, we lastly compare the overhead of our active probing technique with a passive sampling scheme and show that for delay measurement, active probing is more practical.