A method of delay and jitter measurement in an ATM network

Delay and jitter are critical factors in the design of network protocols and real-time applications. However, measuring delay and jitter in an ATM network is not an easy undertaking due to its potential high-speed traffic. We present a simple scheme for measuring cell delay and jitter in both end-to-end and round-trip configurations. This scheme is implemented on a traffic analyzer called Attila which was developed at MCNC under an ARPA project. Instead of using time-stamps, this scheme uses the cell interarrival times measured by an Attila at the source and destination to compute cell jitter. Cell delay is then obtained through a simple manipulation of cell jitter and the baseline delay.