Estimating network path loss episode frequency by passive measurement

End-to-end loss episode frequency is the congestion characteristic of the network path, but it is difficult to measure passively. Although there are active methods to measure this metric, probe packets may have impact on the network in order to get accurate result. In this paper, a passive method is proposed to estimate the packet loss episode frequency of end-to-end network path by parallel TCP flow trace. We evaluate the accuracy of the method by simulations. The results show that the algorithm can estimate the loss episode frequency of end-to-end path within tolerable error range.