Introduction
There are several articles in the literature that warn against using ping/ICMP measurements of RTT compared to TCP and UDP measurements. See for example:
...
Together with this we could use the list of PingER www hosts that respond to pings. Note that sometimes pings are blocked to a host but TCP port 80 packets work, e.g. adl-a-ext1.aarnet.net.au (202.158.195.68).
Project
We wrote a script ping-vs-tcp.pl.
...
The output is in comma separated value format and is exported to Excel (one file for IPv4, one for IPv6) where it is analyzed to look at the histograms of Average(ping_rtt)-Average(nping_rtt) etc. The script was run from a host (pinger.slac.stanford.edu) located st SLAC in Northern California in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the IPv4 data measurements, the script ran for about 6hours and 45 minutes.The distribution histograms show that the agreement between ping and nping average RTT is good:
...