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SPP - Synthetic Packet Pairs
Overview
Regular and frequent measurement of round trip time
(RTT) between points on the Internet is becoming increasingly
important for a range of highly interactive real-time applications.
Active probing techniques are possible but problematic. The
extra packet traffic imposed by active probes along a network
path can modify the behaviour of the network under test. In
addition, estimated RTT results may be misleading if the
network handles active probe packets differently to regular IP
packets. In contrast, SPP provides frequently updated RTT
estimates using IP traffic already present in the network. SPP
estimates the RTT between two measurement points without
requiring precise time synchronisation between each point. SPP
accurately estimates the RTT experienced by any application's
traffic without needing modifications to the application itself or
the routers along the path. In addition, SPP works with
applications that do not exhibit symmetric client-server packet
exchanges (such as many online multiplayer games) and
applications generating IP multicast traffic.
The SPP software available on this website provides a standalone implementation of the algorithm in C.
Program Members
(Alumni: Lutz Mark, Thuy Nguyen, Brandon Tyo, Atwin O. Calchand)
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