Towards a Generalized Stochastic Model of End-to-End Packet-Pair Sampling

End-to-end packet-pair probing has been used as one of the primary mechanisms to measure bottleneck capacity, cross-traffic intensity, and available bandwidth of end-to-end Internet paths. However, there has been lacking an understanding of what types of information about the path are sampled by packet-pairs and how they are encoded in the corresponding output dispersions. In this paper, we answer these questions by deriving the expression of individual output spacings (i.e., dispersions) in the context of multihop paths and general bursty cross-traffic arrivals. Based on these results, we examine stochastic properties of the sampled signals and derive the statistical mean of the output interpacket spacings as a recursive function of the input spacing. We show that the result is different from what has been obtained in prior work using fluid cross-traffic models and that this discrepancy has a significant adverse impact on the accuracy of packet-pair bandwidth measurement techniques