A Resource-Efficient System for Measuring Flow Length Distribution

Abstract

Knowing the length distributions of traffic flows passing through a network link is useful for some applications such as inferring traffic demands, characterizing source traffic, and detecting traffic anomalies. With high-speed Internet links, efficient and effective packet sampling techniques for traffic measurement are not only desirable, but increasingly becoming a necessity. Packet sampling has become an attractive and scalable means to measure flow data on high-speed links. Passive traffic measurement increasingly employs sampling at the packet level and makes inferences from sampled network traffic. Several approaches have been proposed to address flow monitoring. However, they either lack accuracy, or entail the loss of flow identification information. In this paper, we propose a Resource-Efficient System(called RES) for measuring flow length distributions, which consists of Double sampling module, Online streaming module, and Offline processing module. Using real network traffic traces, we show that the RES indeed produces the desired accuracy in measuring the flow distribution.