Comparisons of various ping "Jitter" measures

Comparisons of various ping "Jitter" measures

Les Cottrell and Warren Matthews, Last Update: January 20, 1999

Central Computer Access | Computer Networking | Internet Monitoring | ICFA-NTF Monitoring | Tutorial on ping Internet monitoring

The chart below shows data from sending 100 ping packets from SLAC (Stanford, California) to CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), DESY (Hamburg, Germany) and FNAL (Chicago, Illinois)in early January 1999. The 100 pings are sent with a minimum separation of 1 second roughly every half-hour. The solid points are the Inter Quartile Range (IQR) of the Round Trip Time (RTT) or delay (D) for 100 pings. The open triangles are the IQRs of the Inter Packet Delay Differences or IPDD, where IPDD is defined as: (dD_i = D_i - D_i-1 where i =2 to number of samples).
Delay and IPDD IQR as function of time

The next chart shows a scatter plot of the IQRs for Delay and IPDD from January 8 - 20, 1999 between SLAC and CERN, CMU (Pitsburgh, Pennsylvania), DESY and FNAL.
Delay and IPDD IQR scatter plot
The red line is for y = x . The black line is a straight line fit of the points. It can be seen that for small values the two measures are very similar, but as the IQR of the ping delay exceeds 50 msec. the value of the IQR of the ping IPDD levels off. The correlation is seen to be strong (i.e. R² > 0.6) even without taking into account the dual behavior. A better fit to the above data can be made with a power series with the form y ~ 1.2x^0.88 with an R² = 0.96. A chart showing the scatter plots for color-coded for each remote site with log-log axes and with power series fits (they are shown as colored lines which overlay one another fairly completely so they are hard to distingush) for the various remote sites is also seen together with the parameters of the fits.

Histograms of the frequency of occurence for the delay IQR and the IPDD IQR are seen in the charts below. The black lines are power series fits to the data with the parameters shown. The blue line is cumulative percentile. It can be seen that both distributions have heavy tails.
Delay IQR
histogram IPDD IQR histogram

Below is shown a chart showing the minumum, 25%, 75% and 95% of the distributions of the IQRs for the 100 ping sample delays (RTT) and IPPDs for pings between SLAC and CERN (2 hosts, one a WWW server, the other a name server), CMU, DESY & FNAL measured between January 8 and 20, 1999 is shown below. The top of each thin line is the 95%, the top of each box is 75%, the bottom of each box is 25% and the bottom of each line is the minimum. Each point corresponds to about 570 samples. Each sample corresponds to 100 pings, and the samples were taken at roughly half-hour intervals.
pseudo box plot of IQR
distributions (22283 bytes)

[ Feedback | Reporting Problems ]

Les Cottrell