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Estimating flow distributions from sampled flow statistics

Authors:

Mikkel ThorupAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '03: Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

Pages 325 - 336

https://doi.org/10.1145/863955.863992

Published: 25 August 2003 Publication History

Abstract

Passive traffic measurement increasingly employs sampling at the packet level. Many high-end routers form flow statistics from a sampled substream of packets. Sampling is necessary in order to control the consumption of resources by the measurement operations. However, knowledge of the statistics of flows in the unsampled stream remains useful, for understanding both characteristics of source traffic, and consumption of resources in the network.This paper provide methods that use flow statistics formed from sampled packet stream to infer the absolute frequencies of lengths of flows in the unsampled stream. A key part of our work is inferring the numbers and lengths of flows of original traffic that evaded sampling altogether. We achieve this through statistical inference, and by exploiting protocol level detail reported in flow records. The method has applications to detection and characterization of network attacks: we show how to estimate, from sampled flow statistics, the number of compromised hosts that are sending attack traffic past the measurement point. We also investigate the impact on our results of different implementations of packet sampling.

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Index Terms

Estimating flow distributions from sampled flow statistics
1. Mathematics of computing
  1. Probability and statistics
2. Networks
  1. Network services
    1. Network monitoring

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '03: Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

August 2003

432 pages

ISBN:1581137354

DOI:10.1145/863955

General Chairs:
Anja Feldmann
TU Munich
,
Martina Zitterbart
University of Karlsruhe
,
Program Chairs:
Jon Crowcroft
University of Cambridge
,
David Wetherall
University of Washington

Copyright © 2003 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 25 August 2003

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SIGCOMM03

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SIGCOMM03: Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communications

August 25 - 29, 2003

Karlsruhe, Germany

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SIGCOMM '03 Paper Acceptance Rate 34 of 319 submissions, 11%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/MoNeTec60984.2024.10768126
Graf JChuprikov PEugster PJahnke P(2024)FARM: Comprehensive Data Center Network Monitoring and Management2024 IEEE 44th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS60910.2024.00055(520-530)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS60910.2024.00055
Yang KWu YMiao RYang TLiu ZXu ZQiu RZhao YLv HJi ZXie GSchulzrinne HKohler EMaltz DMisra V(2023)ChameleMon: Shifting Measurement Attention as Network State ChangesProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604850(881-903)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
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