Investigating random behavior of one way delay jitter

Understanding the behavior of network delay serves a very important role in network performance and thus application design. While traversing the network, packets incur random delays due to unpredictable behavior of network. Consequently, network delays may fluctuate rapidly and significantly over small intervals of time. This eccentric variation (jitter) in network delay makes it difficult to provide high quality real-time services. In this paper we study the random behavior of network delays by tracking the variation in One-Way Delay (OWD). Specifically, we accurately measure OWD variations using a scheme that does not assume synchronization between network hosts. Then we provide an adequate model for OWD variations. Also, we explore the degree of dependency between forward and reverse OWD variations by investigating their cross-correlation.