Packet level measurement over wireless access

Abstract

Performance Measurement of the IP packet networks mainly comprise of monitoring the network performance in terms of packet losses and delays. If used appropriately, these network parameters (i.e. delay, loss and bandwidth etc) can indicate the performance status of the network and they can be used in fault and performance monitoring, network provisioning, and traffic engineering. Globally, there is a growing need for accurate network measurement to support the commercial use of IP networks. In wireless networks, transmission losses and communication delays strongly affect the performance of the network. Compared to wired networks, wireless networks experience higher levels of data dropouts, and corruption due to issues of channel fading, noise, interference and mobility. Performance monitoring is a vital element in the commercial future of broadband packet networking and the ability to guarantee quality of service in such networks is implicit in Service Level Agreements. Active measurements are performed by injecting probes, and this is widely used to determine the end to end performance. End to end delay in wired networks has been extensively investigated, and in this thesis we report on the accuracy achieved by probing for end to end delay over a wireless scenario. We have compared two probing techniques i.e. Periodic and Poisson probing, and estimated the absolute error for both. The simulations have been performed for single hop and multi- hop wireless networks. In addition to end to end latency, Active measurements have also been performed for packet loss rate. The simulation based analysis has been tried under different traffic scenarios using Poisson Traffic Models. We have sampled the user traffic using Periodic probing at different rates for single hop and multiple hop wireless scenarios. 5 Active probing becomes critical at higher values of load forcing the network to saturation much earlier. We have evaluated the impact of monitoring overheads on the user traffic, and show that even small amount of probing overhead in a wireless medium can cause large degradation in network performance. Although probing at high rate provides a good estimation of delay distribution of user traffic with large variance yet there is a critical tradeoff between the accuracy of measurement and the packet probing overhead. Our results suggest that active probing is highly affected by probe size, rate, pattern, traffic load, and nature of shared medium, available bandwidth and the burstiness of the traffic.