Strengthening Packet Loss Measurement from the Network Intermediate Point

Abstract

Estimating loss rates with the packet traces captured from some point in the middle of the network has received much attention within the research community. Meanwhile, existing intermediate-point methods like [1] require the capturing system to capture all the TCP traffic that crosses the border of an access network (typically Gigabit network) destined to or coming from the Internet. However, limited to the performance of current hardware and software, capturing network traffic in a Gigabit environment is still a challenging task. The uncaptured packets will affect the total number of captured packets and the estimated number of packet losses, which eventually affects the accuracy of the estimated loss rate. Therefore, to obtain more accurate loss rate, a method of strengthening packet loss measurement from the network intermediate point is proposed in this paper. Through constructing a series of heuristic rules and leveraging the binomial distribution principle, the proposed method realizes the compensation for the estimated loss rate. Also, experiment results show that although there is no increase in the proportion of accurate estimates, the compensation makes the majority of estimates closer to the accurate ones.

Burst Ratio of Packet Losses in Individual Network Flows

“…Therefore, it was studied extensively in many papers, using direct packet loss measurements, (e.g. Bolot, 1993;Coates and Nowak, 2000;Duffield et al, 2001;Benko and Veres, 2002;Sommers et al, 2005;Lan et al, 2019), or theoretical models (e.g. Yajnik et al, 1999;Sanneck and Carle, 1999;Yu et al, 2005;Hasslinger and Hohlfeld, 2008;Chydzinski and Adamczyk, 2012;Jelassi and Rubino, 2018).…”