Thus, measures of round trip times usually give averages, which may have high standard deviation. A technique used in best-effort delivery systems to avoid endlessly looping packets. For example, each IP datagram is assigned an integer time to live when it is created. IP gateways decrement the time to live field when they process a datagram and discard the datagram if the time to live counter reaches zero. A network tool that lets you obtain the list of gateways between your computer and a particular device.
Response times vary depending on network load.
You can use the Trace tool to determine if a gateway is down in the path between your computer and a specified remote host. A measure of distance between two points in an internet. A hop count of n means that n gateways separate the source and destination. A network tool that lets you obtain information on host names and IP addresses. This information also includes possible aliases.