Fixed-Period Packet Sampling and Its Application to Flow Rate Estimation

Sadayoshi ITO
Kousuke UCHIYAMA
Shigeo SHIODA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E90-B    No.10    pp.2673-2682
Publication Date: 2007/10/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1093/ietcom/e90-b.10.2673
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on New Challenge for Internet Technology and its Architecture)
Category: 
Keyword: 
traffic measurement,  flow measurement,  sampling,  flow rate,  estimation,  

Full Text: PDF(3.4MB)>>
Buy this Article


Summary: 
We propose a packet sampling strategy called fixed-period sampling, which selects at most one packet in every fixed-length period. Under the fixed-period sampling, the number of flow-cache lookups during a unit of time or the number of entries in a flow cache is bounded by a constant, which is simply expressed by a few tuning parameters. As an application of the fixed-period sampling, we also focus on the flow-rate estimation from fixed-period sampled packet streams. In particular, we propose a simple estimator based solely on the sampling frequency. We have conducted simulation experiments using two real traces to show basic characteristics of the fixed-period sampling for the comparison with the fixed-period sampling. We also show the accuracy of the proposed flow-rate estimator through simulations.