Congestion Detection in the European Internet

In this paper we present a study about the utilization of one-way delay measurements to detect and characterize network congestion in the european Internet. The experiments have been made using the ETOMIC platform that allows one-way delay measurement with high precision timestamps. We have found a peculiar router behaviour in which the bottleneck is not the available bandwidth but it is the packet processing power of the router (backplane and CPU constraints). This router has been characterized with several network parameters. Some of them are the dependency of this limitation with the input data rate in packets per second, the size of burst packet losses measured in packets or time and the absence of specific scheduling algorithms in the router that could affect to larger flows.