Ping/Traceroute – How to Use Ping/Tracert to Get ISP Information

I found alot of data missing like the size of udp packets, routers processing/queuing time and transmission speed. Also, are both times a packet take to reach a node and be sent back equal?

First, ping uses ICMP, not UDP, and you specify the packet size when you run the command, or the OS may have a fixed packet size. It probably defaults to 64 bytes.

Which OS you are using dictates which type of traceroute you use (e.g. ICMP, UDP, TCP), and whether or not it uses options, all of which affects the size of the packets.

The router queuing and processing time will vary, based on the router model, how it is configured, and how busy the router link is, which may vary by day of the week, time of day, etc. For instance, a shared medium, like a cable modem, may get very busy in the evening when people come home, while a business ISP router is probably busiest during working hours.

I assume you mean bandwidth, rather than the transmission rate (which is well known for electrons traveling through copper wire, or light through fiber). The serialization rate (bandwidth) will vary by hop, and it is more important than the actual transmission speed. Also, the layer-2 protocol on each link has an affect. You will have headers for the layer-2 frames, and the size of those vary by the layer-2 protocol used on a link. For instance, ethernet will add 26 to 30 octets for the frame, and it has a 12-octet gap between frames. If a link has a half-duplex medium, you can be delayed because the medium is in use by other hosts.

ICMP is usually low priority traffic which is queued or dropped in favor of "real" traffic. The performance of ICMP really doesn't reflect how real traffic performs, and many ISPs will redirect ICMP traffic in order to disguise their internal networks.

The path traceroute takes may not reflect anything like the path your other traffic takes. It can even be directed to secondary transit links which your other traffic only takes in the event of a failure.

The time it takes a packet to reach the other end can be different than the time the return packet takes to reach you, and the time it takes to process the packet at the far end and generate a return packet can vary. For instance, ping gives your a round-trip time which is cumulative of the time the packets takes each way and the processing time.

All in all, using ping and traceroute for measurements is crude, fraught with problems, and may not reflect how your other traffic performs. It's even possible that the delay for these in your own network (short physical distance) is greater than the delay from your network perimeter to the ISP perimeter (longer distance).