Sketch Guided Sampling - Using On-Line Estimates of Flow Size for Adaptive Data Collection

— Monitoring the traffic in high-speed networks is a data intensive problem. Uniform packet sampling is the most popular technique for reducing the amount of data the network monitoring hardware/software has to process. However, uniform sampling captures far less information than can be potentially obtained with the same overall sampling rate. This is because uniform sampling (unnecessarily) draws the vast majority of samples from large flows, and very few from small and medium flows. This information loss on small and medium flows significantly affects the accuracy of the estimation of various network statistics. In this work, we develop a new packet sampling methodology called “sketch-guided sampling” (SGS), which offers better statistics than obtainable from uniform sampling, given the same number of raw samples gathered. Its main idea is to make the probability with which an incoming packet is sampled a decreasing sampling function ¢ of the size of the flow the packet ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Abhishek Kumar, Jun Xu
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Packet Sampling, Uniform Packet Sampling, Uniform Sampling