A Measurement Study of the Origins of End-to-End Delay Variations

The end-to-end (e2e) stability of Internet routing has been studied for over a decade, focusing on routes and delays. This paper presents a novel technique for uncovering the origins of delay variations by measuring the overlap between delay distribution of probed routes, and how these are affected by route stability. Evaluation is performed using two large scale experiments from 2006 and 2009, each measuring between more than 100 broadly distributed vantage points. Our main finding is that in both years, about 70% of the measured source-destination pairs and roughly 95% of the academic pairs, have delay variations mostly within the routes, while only 1520% of the pairs and less than 5% of the academic pairs witness a clear difference between the delays of different routes.