Measurement and analysis of end-to-end dependability characteristics in the global network

This paper presents an analysis of measurements on a global route between Norway and China. Measurement statistics was collected every 10 milliseconds during a three-month period in October-December 2009. We provide a detailed characterization of observed loss and delay patterns especially focusing on downtime periods on the sub-second time scale (from 50 milliseconds to 1 second long). Generally, these downtimes are more difficult to measure, but they may also have a noticeable negative effect on quality of real-time services and multimedia applications. The paper investigates causes for all these events and finds that the plausible causes most of observed communication problems in the given study are either link or router related (level 2 or 3). Packet loss events caused by congestion could also be distinguished, but they happened very rarely. Using the collected data set, we also study several other questions related to routing and network availability modeling.