Network measurement and path characterization using user datagram protocol

The Internet is very dynamic, unreliable, and complex in nature. Many of its characteristics are not very visible since TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) provides a reliable end-to-end data delivery between two communicating hosts. However, it is possible to design some experiments using UDP (User Datagram Protocol) to observe and measure some of the characteristics of the Internet as well as of a network that supports UDP as a transport protocol. In this paper, some experiments on observing and measuring network characteristics such as round-trip time, throughput, packet loss or duplication, and path bandwidth between two communicating hosts are presented. In addition, an instructive project idea using UDP for understanding the operation of a reliable transport protocol like TCP is presented. These experiments can provide students a good insight on the complexity of the Internet environment and teach how to characterize and measure performance of an Internet path for data delivery.