On the performance of a simple packet rate estimator

This paper proposes a simple packet rate estimator that can be very useful in predicting the rate of network traffic. The quality and performance of the estimator is evaluated and compared with three popular rate estimators that were originally designed for estimating bit rate. The proposed estimator is highly cost effective as its computation is not carried out upon the arrival of each incoming packet. In addition, the computation is simple and does not depend on the measurement of interarrival times of packets. We evaluate and compare the quality and performance in terms of agility, stability, accuracy and cost. The performance evaluation is conducted using discrete-event simulation that produces synthesized bursty traffic with empirical packet sizes.