In this chapter I review the literature concerned with end-to-end Internet performance measurements.
To my surprise, I have not found any institutions or organisations doing research directly related to the flood ping, a kind of ping activity of which the behaviour is investigated in this study. I speculate this might have been caused by ethical concerns, because most of the information I have found regarding the use of flood ping is related to network attacks. In Section 2.1 I discuss the ethical issue of doing flood ping.
For the broader research area of end-to-end Internet performance measurement, however, there are lots of activities and literature. Some of them involve the use of ping or similar tools. I will review them as follows.
In Section 2.2 I present the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)'s work on defining IP Performance Metrics (IPPM; [33]). In Section 2.3 I introduce several measurement projects, which are representative of current research directions. In Section 2.4 I look at the issue of the accuracy of time related measurements. Finally in Section 2.5 I review some previous research on end-to-end Internet traffic dynamics.