In this chapter I investigate short term high density ping traffic patterns. The patterns of interest are those of wire round-trip time (WRTT) and packet loss.
Unless particularly stated, the data used for analysis in this chapter is measured by m1, which is one of the two dedicated monitoring machines used in the study. Using the measurement from tcpdump running on a dedicated monitoring machine rather than the measurement from ping itself is to avoid distortion of WRTT patterns caused by large source processing delays, which we have seen in the previous chapter.
In Section 5.1 we look at several buffering and queueing patterns. Section 5.2 examines the influence of packet size over traffic pattern. Section 5.3 shows an example of out-of-order packet delivery. In Section 5.4 the problem of trying to send ping packets as fast as possible using the ``preload'' option of ping, is illustrated. Finally, in Section 5.5, I draw some conclusions.