Abstract

Distributed physical models of musical instruments have been used to acoustically “ping ” Internet connections between two network hosts. Sound waves propagated through Internet acoustics behave just as in air, water or along a stretched string. In this case, a musical synthesis technique creates waves on the Internet path between two hosts. When waves recirculate between two endpoints, a musical tone is created if the round trip travel time lies within the range of our pitch sense (roughly  ¢¡¤£¤¥§¦ to ¡¤£©¨� ¦). The result-ing tones provide a quick and intuitive evaluation of quality of service (QoS), displaying its significant aspects including latency, jitter and packet loss. Stable, clear tones with high pitch indicate good end-to-end capabilities that a path must support for immersive, real-time applications. A “network harp ” recently demonstrated 320 synthesized strings oscillating across the Western half of the Internet2 Abilene Network. 1.

Citations