As the number of Internet applications in critical situations increases, the quality assurance of the network infrastructure becomes more and more important. The operators of such networks have to maintain the network as reliable and available with sufficient performance. Measurement technology is the key to maintaining the network condition and provides the network as being the important infrastructure of the network society. To meet these requirements, a high-speed and accurate IP meter, HIM, has been developed. Specific hardware has been made to realize the necessary specifications that enable data capturing with 20-µsecond order timing information from a gigabit class network. The experimental results with HIM show that: 1) software-based equipment cannot handle 100-µsecond order timing information, 2) the current computer system can transmit a high-speed (30 Mpbs) multimedia stream in accurate timing (jitter less than 20 µseconds) with UDP, 3) but TCP's retransmission mechanism makes the jitter worse (up to 264 mil seconds) and, 4) WAN's one-way traffic exhibits some strange behavior, which requires further investigation.

This paper presents measurement and analysis of various networks and applications using a high-speed IP meter. The authors have developed a high-speed IP meter with a GPS timestamp component, which enables precise measurement of packet delay and jitter in various networks. Measurement of the following networks was performed, 1) Measurement of traffic in a commercial IPv6 access service on ADSL, as a typical broadband access service network. 2) Measurement of traffic in the 54th IETF meeting in Yokohama, as a typical high-speed Internet backbone network. This paper reports the characteristics identified in these networks, e.g. asymmetricities of one-way packet delay over an ADSL access network and the difference in TCP/UDP packet delay over a high-speed backbone network. It also presents the analysis results of some multimedia applications in the Internet, and discusses the quality of service on Internet access service networks.