Abstract: The traditional measurement based method for estimating Internet performance parameters rectuires measurement points to be the start and the end of an end-to-end path. Such condition can make measurement aimless and increase network traffic. Meanwhile the estimation may be hard to implement, and the results may also be less accurate.This paper proposed a novel approach based on segmental measurement to estimate delay, delay variation, loss rate and error rate, which were defined by ITU-T. As each measurement can be used to several end-to-end path performance parameter estimations, the aimless of measurement was avoided and the network traffic was cut down significantly. Three module, including packet and path generator, parameter measurement machine and result collector, were designed and implemented based on PlanetLab. Its feasibility was illustrated by deploying on more than 100 world wide nodes. And the running data collected by result collector proved its accuracy.

Key words: Performance estimation, Segmental measurement, Delay variation, PlanetLab