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Three Bits Suffice: Explicit Support for Passive Measurement of Internet Latency in QUIC and TCP

Published: 31 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Passive measurement is a commonly used approach for measuring round trip time (RTT), as it reduces bandwidth overhead compared to large-scale active measurements. However, passive RTT measurement is limited to transport-specific approaches, such as those that utilize Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) timestamps. Furthermore, the continuing deployment of encrypted transport protocols such as QUIC hides the information used for passive RTT measurement from the network.
In this work, we introduce the latency spin signal as a lightweight, transport-independent and explicit replacement for TCP timestamps for passive latency measurement. This signal supports per-flow, single-point and single direction passive measurement of end-to-end RTT using just three bits in the transport protocol header, leveraging the existing dynamics of the vast majority of Internet-deployed transports. We show how the signal applies to measurement of both TCP and to QUIC through implementation of the signal in endpoint transport stacks. We also provide a high-performance measurement implementation for the signal using the Vector Packet Processing (VPP) framework. Evaluation on emulated networks and in an Internet testbed demonstrate the viability of the signal, and show that it is resistant to even large amounts of loss or reordering on the measured path.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Demo: Security Vulnerabilities and Network Service Disruptions with HTTP/32024 IEEE 49th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN60385.2024.10639685(1-4)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Does It Spin? On the Adoption and Use of QUIC's Spin BitProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624844(554-560)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Unity is strength: Improving Wi-Fi passive measurements through sniffer redundancyAd Hoc Networks10.1016/j.adhoc.2023.103287151(103287)Online publication date: Dec-2023
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IMC '18: Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018
      October 2018
      507 pages
      ISBN:9781450356190
      DOI:10.1145/3278532
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      Published: 31 October 2018

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      October 31 - November 2, 2018
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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)Demo: Security Vulnerabilities and Network Service Disruptions with HTTP/32024 IEEE 49th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN60385.2024.10639685(1-4)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
      • (2023)Does It Spin? On the Adoption and Use of QUIC's Spin BitProceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3618257.3624844(554-560)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
      • (2023)Unity is strength: Improving Wi-Fi passive measurements through sniffer redundancyAd Hoc Networks10.1016/j.adhoc.2023.103287151(103287)Online publication date: Dec-2023
      • (2022)High-Speed Path Probing Method for Large-Scale NetworkSensors10.3390/s2215565022:15(5650)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2022
      • (2022)On the interplay between TLS certificates and QUIC performanceProceedings of the 18th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3555050.3569123(204-213)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2022
      • (2022)How much can Sniffer Redundancy Improve Wi-Fi Traffic?2022 IEEE 95th Vehicular Technology Conference: (VTC2022-Spring)10.1109/VTC2022-Spring54318.2022.9860874(1-5)Online publication date: Jun-2022
      • (2022)Evaluating QUIC Performance Over Web, Cloud Storage, and Video WorkloadsIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2021.313456219:2(1366-1381)Online publication date: Jun-2022
      • (2022)Assessing the Completeness of Passive Wi-Fi Traffic Capture2022 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC)10.1109/IWCMC55113.2022.9824970(961-966)Online publication date: 30-May-2022
      • (2021)Tracking the QUIC spin bit on TofinoProceedings of the 2021 Workshop on Evolution, Performance and Interoperability of QUIC10.1145/3488660.3493804(15-21)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2021
      • (2021)L, Q, R, and TProceedings of the 2021 Applied Networking Research Workshop10.1145/3472305.3472319(22-28)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2021
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