IP Traffic Measurements between IP Service Providers (ISP)
Jorge Filipe Gomes da Silva · 2009
The existing Internet evolved from the ARPANET, an experimental data network founded by U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1960s. The entire technology is supported by a Datagram model, where each packet carries the complete source and destination address and is individually and independently delivered to its destination through the network. The adoption of the TCP/IP Protocol took place in mid-1980s. This evolution became crucial to inter-connect different networks in the world and to render a universal service to applications. The current Internet service is often referred to as a best effort. Best effort service is the simplest type of service that a network can offer; this service does not provide full reliability, since the delivery of packets is not guaranteed. However, best effort service is not the best service to support current applications, such as real-time and multimedia applications, because this service does not guarantee packet delivery to the destination and the packets can have a large delay variation. Nowadays, the Internet is the world’s largest public network. The web also serves as a platform for the deployment of new applications such as streamed multimedia services, Voice over IP (VoIP), peer-to-peer (P2P), and real time applications. This evolution of the Internet has brought new challenges. Many of the applications need a very good network performance to support their service requirements. So it was defined the following objective: Quality of Service (QoS) for Internet. Internet QoS is defined as a measurable level of service delivered to network users, which can be characterized by a set of metrics (e.g., packet loss probability, delay, jitter or delay variation, available bandwidth, throughput). Such QoS can be provisioned by network service providers in terms of a service agreement (e.g., a Service Level Agreement or SLA) between subscribers and providers. A QoS mechanism is a set of protocols designed to endow network devices to serve the competing applications in Internet differently by following a set of predefined policies. The role of policies in a QoS mechanism is to determine when a network device should serve packets of a particular application in the presence of packets from other contending applications. Traffic measurements give a very good perspective of what is going on all over the network. In Europe measurement between ISP’s are performed by a non-profit center: RIPE NCC. These measurements could be used to supervise and monitor intra and inter-domain traffic. RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens / NCC Network Coordination Center) offers the service of network management known as Test Traffic Measurements (TTM). It allows to comprehensively and continuously monitoring the connectivity between specific networks and with other parts of the Internet. Measurements carried out with TTM includes one way delays between hosts (latency), packet losses, path information (”traceroute”),