A Flexible Tomography Approach for Queueing Delay Distribution Inference in Communication Networks

We present in detail a flexible method for inferring internal queueing-delay distributions in a network, by performing correlated unicast packet-pair measurements. The method is based on the quantization of the measured endto-end delays, maximum-likelihood estimation via the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, and making numerical deconvolutions via the non-negative least squares (NNLS) algorithm. We have tested the inference method in realistic network simulations as well as in real local area network (LAN) measurements using different scenarios and found impressive agreement between the estimated and real queueing-delay distributions.

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