StampLite: Accurate Active Latency Measurement on Linux using Commodity Hardware : A Practical Study Through the Implementation of STAMP (Simple Two Way Active Measurement Protocol)

Sammanfattning

Accurate latency measurement is fundamental to reliable network diagnostics and performance tuning. However, most active measurement tools overlook the delay and jitter they themselves introduce, partially masking the very metrics they are supposed to expose. This thesis investigates how accurately network latency can be captured on commodity Linux-based hardware. We design, implement, and release StampLite — a lightweight Simple Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (STAMP) open-source implementation for Linux — and benchmark it against popular tools (ping, twping, and twampy) in tightly controlled virtual and physical testbed environments. Our implementation reduces the systematic overestimation of one-way and round-trip delay - caused by host processing time and the tool’s own latency - by approximately an order of magnitude compared to existing solutions. In both physical and virtualized testbeds, delay overestimation is limited to under 20 μs and jitter is below 2 μs. In addition, our experiments reveal that some performance improvements, such as polling, heavily affect results on physical hardware but have a limited effect on simulated topologies. This underscores the importance of validating measurement software using physical equipment. By making the code publicly available and sharing replicable experiments, we reduce the barrier to future research on low-cost, high-precision network telemetry.