Statistical Analysis of Packet Delay Time and Variation on the Internet

Delay is a crucial factor on the Internet especially for real-time applications like video or audio. The best-effort service model doesn't provide essential assistance to these applications because of the unstable queuing delays. In this work, we present the result of a measurement study designed to understand packet delay time and variation on the Internet. Measurements are performed between some vantage points in different countries using PlanetLab. Some statistical properties of the collected data were examined. It is inferred from the results that delay values are mostly appropriate for implementing real-time applications. Besides, delay over a path is stable in general while it has outliers from time to time. It means that distribution is right skewed. Values are clustered around the mode value and not dispersed too much.