One-way delay estimation and its application

Delay estimation is a difficult problem in computer networks. Accurate one-way delay estimation is crucial because it serves a very important role in network performance and thus application design. RTT (Round Trip Time) is often used as an approximation of the delay, but because it is a sum of the forward and reverse delays, the actual one-way delay cannot be estimated accurately from RTT. To estimate one-way delay accurately, this paper proposes a new scheme that analytically derives one-way delay, forward and reverse delay, respectively. We show that the performance of TCP can improve dramatically in asymmetric networks using our scheme. A key contribution of this paper is that our one-way delay estimation is much more accurate than RTT estimation so that TCP can quickly find the network capacity in the slow start phase. Since RTT is the sum of the forward and reverse delays, our scheme can be applied to any protocol that is based on RTT. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.