Analysis on the fluctuation magnitude in probe interval for active measurement

Active measurement, which can provide end-to-end measurements of network performance, is critical since the Internet is managed by multiple organizations. Recently, on the active measurement of delay and loss, Baccelli et al reported that many probing policies can be used to provide appropriate estimation in addition to the traditional policy based on PASTA property if the volume of probe stream is negligible compared to the traffic stream. Probing schemes with fixed probe packet intervals suffer from the phase-lock phenomenon due to synchronization against the network performance; they do, however, provide superior accuracy. A remaining issue is how to decide the optimal probing policy while taking the phase-lock phenomenon into consideration. In this paper, we propose the probing policy that randomly fluctuates the probe packet interval to avoid the phase-lock phenomenon. We start by clarifying the relationships among the fluctuation magnitude, the properties of the target network, and estimation accuracy, and we discuss the optimal probing policy with regard to the properties of the target network.