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Improving accuracy in end-to-end packet loss measurement

Published: 22 August 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Measurement and estimation of packet loss characteristics are challenging due to the relatively rare occurrence and typically short duration of packet loss episodes. While active probe tools are commonly used to measure packet loss on end-to-end paths, there has been little analysis of the accuracy of these tools or their impact on the network. The objective of our study is to understand how to measure packet loss episodes accurately with end-to-end probes. We begin by testing the capability of standard Poisson-modulated end-to-end measurements of loss in a controlled laboratory environment using IP routers and commodity end hosts. Our tests show that loss characteristics reported from such Poisson-modulated probe tools can be quite inaccurate over a range of traffic conditions. Motivated by these observations, we introduce a new algorithm for packet loss measurement that is designed to overcome the deficiencies in standard Poisson-based tools. Specifically, our method creates a probe process that (1) enables an explicit trade-off between accuracy and impact on the network, and (2) enables more accurate measurements than standard Poisson probing at the same rate. We evaluate the capabilities of our methodology experimentally by developing and implementing a prototype tool, called BADABING. The experiments demonstrate the trade-offs between impact on the network and measurement accuracy. We show that BADABING reports loss characteristics far more accurately than traditional loss measurement tools.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 35, Issue 4
Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
October 2005
324 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/1090191
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM '05: Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
    August 2005
    350 pages
    ISBN:1595930094
    DOI:10.1145/1080091
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 August 2005
Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 35, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. Badabing
  2. active measurement
  3. network congestion
  4. network probes
  5. packet loss

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