Unicast-based inference of network link delay statistics

The cumulants of link delay distributions is an important input parameter for network control and management. In this paper, we propose a method to infer the link delay cumulants from end-to-end measurements without the cooperation between the network internal nodes. We first construct a linear equations by using the relationship between the link delay cumulants and the path delay cumulants, and then solve the equations to get the optimal estimates of link delay cumulants. The ns-2 simulation results show that our method is capable of obtaining accurate estimates of the link delay cumulants.