Statistical Evaluation of TCP Packet Loss Rate Estimation

Packet sampling techniques have recently attracted much attention as a solution to the traffic measurement in high-speed networks, where large processing cost is incurred when monitoring the behaviors of a large number of sessions. We have proposed a method for estimating TCP packet loss rate from sampled packets and have evaluated the method through simulations and experiments. Results of those evaluations showed that the proposed method accurately estimates the TCP packet loss rate from a sampling of 10% of the TCP packets. The estimation accuracy depends on the input parameters, such as sampling probability and iteration number of the algorithm, for the estimation function. In this paper we clarify the properties of each parameter by statistical evaluation and show that the proposed method is sufficiently accurate in typical applications under practical conditions