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

Abstract— We propose a packet sampling strategy called fixedperiod sampling, which selects at most one packet in every fixedlength 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 flowrate estimation from fixed-period sampled packet streams. In particular, we propose a simple estimator based solely on the sampling frequency overestimates flow rates of detected flows. 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. I. I Traffic measurement is important in various tasks including accounting, network prov...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICC
• Authors: Sadayoshi Ito, Kousuke Uchiyama, Shigeo Shioda
• Keywords: Communications, ICC 2007, Packet Sampling Strategy, fixed-period Sampling, flow Cache