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DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.16

Monitoring Latency on Submarine Cables: Limitations and Opportunities

Authors: Mia Weaver, Darryl Veitch, Paul Barford, Fabián E. Bustamante, and Esteban Carisimo

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 139, 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026)

Abstract

The world’s Submarine Cable Network (SCN) is a critical component of the Internet, supporting both inter- and intra- continental communication. We describe a methodology to extract packet latency (via RTT) information on submarine segments, using existing deployed infrastructure collecting standard traceroute measurements. The first component of the methodology identifies vantage points whose measurements traverse submarine segments. The second component provides novel, path-change-aware, approaches to extract the minRTT over the segments, using those vantage points. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method by using traceroute measurements from perfSONAR deployments as ground truth. Our results provide a clear view of the inherent limitations of existing deployed infrastructure. Although both our methodology and minimum RTT estimators raise the state of the art, they also reveal that such infrastructure cannot hope, in general, to access dynamic latency metrics such as latency variability (variance) arising from congestion.

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Mia Weaver, Darryl Veitch, Paul Barford, Fabián E. Bustamante, and Esteban Carisimo. Monitoring Latency on Submarine Cables: Limitations and Opportunities. In 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 139, pp. 16:1-16:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{weaver_et_al:OASIcs.NINeS.2026.16,
  author =	{Weaver, Mia and Veitch, Darryl and Barford, Paul and Bustamante, Fabi\'{a}n E. and Carisimo, Esteban},
  title =	{{Monitoring Latency on Submarine Cables: Limitations and Opportunities}},
  booktitle =	{1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026)},
  pages =	{16:1--16:24},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-414-7},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{139},
  editor =	{Argyraki, Katerina and Panda, Aurojit},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.16},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-256013},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.16},
  annote =	{Keywords: Submarine Cable Network, Internet Measurement}
}

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Monitoring Latency on Submarine Cables: Limitations and Opportunities

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