LossDetection: Real-Time Packet Loss Monitoring System for Sampled Traffic Data

Abstract

Packet loss is common in networks, which leads to network quality of service degradation. Packet loss is an essential and concerning symptom when the quality of service is degraded. Therefore, real-time passive packet loss detection is conducive to estimating network services. Existing passive packet loss detection methods mainly study the packet loss for TCP using header information from full traffic. However, it cannot infer packet loss status for UDP due to its limited header information and is too costly to perform full acquisition in real networks. To address these problems, we propose a framework called LossDetection based on packet sampling and Feature-Sketch to detect packet loss in real time for both TCP and UDP. The result shows that our methodology can detect packet loss with an accuracy of 98%-100% at a sampling rate of 1/16. Furthermore, our extensive evaluation demonstrates that LossDetection is easy to implement in a software router and achieves low memory and detection latency while providing real-time information about packet loss.