General Internet service assessment by latency including partial measurements

Abstract

Latency is one of the key parameters of Internet services. However, it is difficult to correctly assess a service by its latency. Many latency measurements are blocked en route by routers and firewalls. For this reason, the service latency is not fully known. This work proposes a method to assess Internet services including the blocked latency measurements. Survival theory is applied to process latency values. The results show that the omission of blocked latencies from statistical processing severely underestimates the service latency. Two Internet service providers were compared as an example. Their latency difference was 9ms using the traditional approach. The survival latency resulted in a difference of 17ms. The method of survival latency can be used to increase revenues in e-commerce and to improve the experience of online gaming.Latency is one of the key parameters of Internet services. However, it is difficult to correctly assess a service by its latency. Many latency measurements are blocked en route by routers and firewalls. For this reason, the service latency is not fully known. This work proposes a method to assess Internet services including the blocked latency measurements. Survival theory is applied to process latency values. The results show that the omission of blocked latencies from statistical processing severely underestimates the service latency. Two Internet service providers were compared as an example. Their latency difference was 9ms using the traditional approach. The survival latency resulted in a difference of 17ms. The method of survival latency can be used to increase revenues in e-commerce and to improve the experience of online gaming.