Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
article

Improving accuracy in end-to-end packet loss measurement

Published: 22 August 2005 Publication History
  • Get Citation Alerts
  • 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.

    References

    [1]
    The Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory. http://wail.cs.wisc.edu, 2005.
    [2]
    A. Adams, J. Mahdavi, M. Mathis, and V. Paxson. Creating a scalable architecture for Internet measurement. IEEE Network, 1998.
    [3]
    G. Almes, S. Kalidindi, and M. Zekauskas. A one way packet loss metric for IPPM. IETF RFC 2680, September 1999.
    [4]
    S. Alouf, P. Nain, and D. Towsley. Inferring network characteristics via moment-based estimators. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '00, Tel Aviv, Israel, April 2000.
    [5]
    G. Appenzeller, I. Keslassy, and N. McKeown. Sizing router buffers. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '04, Portland, OR, 2004.
    [6]
    P. Barford and J. Sommers. Comparing probe- and router-based packet loss measurements. IEEE Internet Computing, September/October 2004.
    [7]
    P. Benko and A. Veres. A passive method for estimating end-to-end TCP packet loss. In Proceedings of IEEE Globecom '02, Taipei, Taiwan, November 2002.
    [8]
    J. Bolot. End-to-end packet delay and loss behavior in the Internet. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '93, San Francisco, September 1993.
    [9]
    S. Brumelle. On the relationship between customer and time averages in queues. Journal of Applied Probability, 8, 1971.
    [10]
    N. Cardwell, S. Savage, and T. Anderson. Modeling TCP latency. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '00, Tel-Aviv, Israel, March 2000.
    [11]
    M. Coates and R. Nowak. Network loss inference using unicast end-to-end measurement. In Proceedings of ITC Conference on IP Traffic, Measurement and Modeling, September 2000.
    [12]
    N. Duffield, F. Lo Presti, V. Paxson, and D. Towsley. Inferring link loss using striped unicast probes. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '01, Anchorage, Alaska, April 2001.
    [13]
    S. Floyd and V. Paxson. Difficulties in simulating the Internet. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 9(4), 2001.
    [14]
    C. Fraleigh, C. Diot, B. Lyles, S. Moon, P. Owezarski, D. Papagiannaki, and F. Tobagi. Design and deployment of a passive monitoring infrastructure. In Proceedings of Passive and Active Measurement Workshop, Amsterdam, Holland, April 2001.
    [15]
    J. Hoe. Improving the start-up behavior of a congestion control scheme for TCP. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '96, Palo Alto, CA, August 1996.
    [16]
    Merit Internet Performance Measurement and Analysis Project. http://nic.merit.edu/ipma/, 1998.
    [17]
    Internet Protocol Performance Metrics. http://www.advanced.org/ippm/index.html, 1998.
    [18]
    L. Le, J. Aikat, K. Jeffay, and F. Smith. The effects of active queue management on web performance. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, Karlsruhe, Germany, August 2003.
    [19]
    W. Leland, M. Taqqu, W. Willinger, and D. Wilson. On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic (extended version). IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, pages 2:1--15, 1994.
    [20]
    J. Mahdavi, V. Paxson, A. Adams, and M. Mathis. Creating a scalable architecture for Internet measurement. In Proceedings of INET '98, Geneva, Switzerland, July 1998.
    [21]
    M. Mathis, J. Mahdavi, S. Floyd, and A. Romanow. TCP selective acknowledgement options. IETF RFC 2018, 1996.
    [22]
    M. Mathis, J. Semke, J. Mahdavi, and T. Ott. The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm. Computer Communications Review, 27(3), July 1997.
    [23]
    NLANR Passive Measurement and Analysis (PMA). http://pma.nlanr.net/, 2005.
    [24]
    J. Padhye, V. Firoiu, D. Towsley, and J. Kurose. Modeling TCP throughput: A simple model and its empirical validation. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '98, Vancouver, Canada, September 1998.
    [25]
    D. Papagiannaki, R. Cruz, and C. Diot. Network performance monitoring at small time scales. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference '03, Miami, FL, October 2003.
    [26]
    A. Pasztor and D. Veitch. PC based Precision timing without GPS. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS, Marina Del Ray, CA, June 2002.
    [27]
    V. Paxson. End-to-end Internet packet dynamics. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '97, Cannes, France, September 1997.
    [28]
    V. Paxson. Strategies for sound Internet measurement. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference '04, Taormina, Italy, November 2004.
    [29]
    K. Salamatian, B. Baynat, and T. Bugnazet. Cross traffic estimation by loss process analysis. In Proceedings of ITC Specialist Seminar on Internet Traffic Engineering and Traffic Management, Wurzburg, Germany, July 2003.
    [30]
    S. Savage. Sting: A tool for measuring one way packet loss. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '00, Tel Aviv, Israel, April 2000.
    [31]
    J. Sommers and P. Barford. Self-configuring network traffic generation. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference '04, 2004.
    [32]
    The DETER Testbed. http://www.isi.edu/deter/, 2005.
    [33]
    A. Tirumala, F. Qin, J. Dugan, J. Ferguson, and K. Gibbs. Iperf 1.7.0 -- the TCP/UDP bandwidth measurement tool. http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf. 2005.
    [34]
    C. Villamizar and C. Song. High Performance TCP in ASNET. Computer Communications Review, 25(4), December 1994.
    [35]
    B. White, J. Lepreau, L. Stoller, R. Ricci, S. Guruprasad, M. Newbold, M. Hibler, C. Barb, and A. Joglekar. An integrated experimental environment for distributed systems and networks. In Proceedings of 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), Boston, MA, December 2002.
    [36]
    R. Wolff. Poisson arrivals see time averages. Operations Research, 30(2), March-April 1982.
    [37]
    M. Yajnik, S. Moon, J. Kurose, and D. Towsley. Measurement and modeling of temporal dependence in packet loss. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '99, New York, NY, March 1999.
    [38]
    L. Zhang, Z. Liu, and C. Xia. Clock Synchronization Algorithms for Network Measurements. In Proceedings of IEEE Infocom, New York, NY, June 2002.
    [39]
    Y. Zhang, N. Duffield, V. Paxson, and S. Shenker. On the constancy of Internet path properties. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop '01, San Francisco, November 2001.

    Cited By

    View all

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    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]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

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

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

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

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)213
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)22
    Reflects downloads up to 12 Aug 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Loss Process at an AQM BufferJournal of Sensor and Actuator Networks10.3390/jsan1204005512:4(55)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
    • (2022)Accurate Parallel Flow Monitoring for Loss MeasurementsIEICE Transactions on Communications10.1587/transcom.2021EBP3160E105.B:12(1530-1539)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2022
    • (2022)Burst ratio for a versatile traffic modelPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.027226317:8(e0272263)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
    • (2022)Per-flow structure of losses in a finite-buffer queueApplied Mathematics and Computation10.1016/j.amc.2022.127215428(127215)Online publication date: Sep-2022
    • (2022)Burst Ratios of Individual FlowsInformation Systems and Technologies10.1007/978-3-031-04829-6_33(372-381)Online publication date: 11-May-2022
    • (2020)Development of System for Measuring Internet Speed and Network Parameters on Fixed and Mobile Communication Networks Based on Recommendation ITU-T Q.3961 and Recommendation ITU-T Q.3056 Using ProbesProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Future Networks and Distributed Systems10.1145/3440749.3442608(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Nov-2020
    • (2020)Experimental testing of the performance of packet dropping schemes2020 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)10.1109/ISCC50000.2020.9219624(1-7)Online publication date: Jul-2020
    • (2020)Queues With the Dropping Function and Non-Poisson ArrivalsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.29761478(39819-39829)Online publication date: 2020
    • (2019)Queues with the dropping function and general service timePLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.021944414:7(e0219444)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2019
    • (2019)Multipoint Passive Monitoring in Packet NetworksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2019.295015727:6(2377-2390)Online publication date: Dec-2019
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Get Access

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media