Estimating packet loss-rate by using delay information and combined with change-of-measure framework

We previously proposed a change-of-measure based performance measurement method which combines active and passive measurement to estimate user-experienced performance. We also applied this method to packet-delay estimation. In this paper, we apply this method to loss-rate estimation. Because packet loss rarely occurs in current networks, its measurement usually requires a huge number of probe packets, which imposes a non-negligible load on the networks. We propose a loss-rate estimation method which requires significantly fewer number of probe packets. In our proposed method, the correlation between delay and loss is measured in advance, and at the time of measurement, the time-averaged loss rate is estimated by using the delay of probe packets and the correlation. We also applied our change-of-measure framework to estimating the loss rate in user packets by using this time-averaged loss rate. We prove that the mean square error in our method is lower than that simple loss measurement, which is estimated by dividing the number of lost packets by the total number of sent packets. We evaluated our method through simulations and actual measurements and found that it can estimate below 10−3 packet loss rate with only 900 probe packets.