Internet roundtrip delay prediction using the maximum entropy principle

Internet roundtrip delay/time (RTT) prediction plays an important role in detecting packet losses in reliable transport protocols for traditional web applications and determining proper transmission rates in many rate-based TCP-friendly protocols for Internet-based real-time applications. The widely adopted autoregressive and moving average (ARMA) model with fixed-parameters is shown to be insufficient for all scenarios due to its intrinsic limitation that it filters out all high-frequency components of RTT dynamics. In this paper, we introduce a novel parameter-varying RTT model for Internet roundtrip time prediction based on the information theory and the maximum entropy principle (MEP). Since the coefficients of the proposed RTT model are updated dynamically, the model is adaptive and it tracks RTT dynamics rapidly. The results of our experiments show that the MEP algorithm works better than the ARMA method in both RTT prediction and RTO estimation.