Intrusiveness-aware Estimation for high quantiles of a packet delay distribution

The active measurement of network quality, in which probe packets are injected into a network, is hindered by the intrusiveness problem, where the load of the probe traffic itself affects network quality. In this paper, we first demonstrate that there exists a fundamental bound on the accuracy of the conventional active measurement of delay. Second, to transcend that bound, we propose INTEST (INTrusiveness-aware ESTimation), an approach that compensates for delays produced by probe packets for wired networks. We show that INTEST enables an accurate high quantile estimation of delay. We do so through two simulations: a single-hop network composed of a router modeled by M/M/1 queuing, and a realistic multi-hop network modeled by a network simulator.