Experimental Evaluation of TCP and ICMP in Network Measurement

Network measurement is an important approach to understand network behaviors, which has been widely studied. Both Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Control Messages Protocol (ICMP) are applied in network measurement, while investigating the differences between the measured results of these two protocols is an important topic that has been less investigated. In this paper, to compare the differences between TCP and ICMP when they are used in measuring host connectivity, RTT, and packet loss rate, two groups of comparison programs have been designed, and after careful evaluation of the program parameters, a lot of comparison experiments are executed on the Internet. The experimental results show that, there are significant differences between the host connectivity measured using TCP or ICMP; in general, the accuracy of connectivity measured using TCP is 20%30% higher than that measured using ICMP. The case of RTT and packet loss rate is complicated, which are related to path loads and destination host loads. While commonly, the RTT and packet loss rate measured using TCP or ICMP are very close. According to the experimental results, some advices are also given on protocol selection for conducting accurate connectivity, RTT and packet loss rate measurements.

Network measurement is an important approach to understand network behaviors, which has been widely studied. Both Transfer Control Protocol （TCP） and Interact Control Messages Protocol （ICMP） are applied in network measurement, while investigating the differences between the measured results of these two protocols is an important topic that has been less investigated. In this paper, to compare the differences between TCP and ICMP when they are used in measuring host connectivity, RTT, and packet loss rate, two groups of comparison programs have been designed, and after careful evaluation of the program parameters, a lot of comparison experiments are executed on the Internet. The experimental results show that, there are significant differences between the host connectivity measured using TCP or ICMP; in general, the accuracy of connectivity measured using TCP is 20%- 30% higher than that measured using ICMP. The case of RTT and packet loss rate is complicated, which are related to path loads and destination host loads. While commonly, the RTF and packet loss rate＂ measured using TCP or ICMP are very close. According to the experimental results, some advices are also given on protocol selection for conducting accurate connectivity, RTF and packet loss rate measurements.