Packet variation delay distribution discrimination based on Kullback-Leibler divergence

Abstract

In many real-time applications the Quality of Service (QoS) is dominated by jitter. Currently jitter generators are based on Laplace distribution. Nevertheless, the observed jitter measurements depart from that distribution. As a matter of fact data resembles those of a t-Student distribution, and it is also known that Internet traffic presents heavy tailed behavior that can be modeled with alpha-stable distributions. The intention of this work is to find which of these distributions has the best fitting. For this purpose, we collect extensive (round trip time) RTT measurements, and show that the alpha-stable distribution models the jitter adequately. Fitness test included Kullback-Leibler divergence and P-P plot criteria. Alpha-stable parameters are dependent on the transmission hop numbers.