The Stationarity of Internet Path Properties: Routing, Loss, and Throughput

There is much interest in using network measurements for both modeling and operational purposes. In this paper we focus on the fundamental question of the stationarity of such measurements. That is, to what extent are past measurements a good predictor of the future? We used the NIMI infrastructure and a set of public traceroute servers to capture large measurement datasets of three quantities: routing, packet loss, and TCP throughput. We apply statistical tests to attempt to develop sound characterizations of the stationarity of these data sets, and discuss several types of nonstationarity.

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