Inferring Traffic Flow Characteristics from Aggregated-Flow Measurement

In the Internet, statistical perspective of global traffic flows has been considered as an important key to network management. Nonetheless, it is expensive or sometime difficult to measure statistics of each flow separately. Therefore it is of practical importance to infer unobservable statistical characteristics of flows from characteristics of the aggregated-flows which are easily measured at some links (router interfaces) in the network. In this paper, we propose a new approach to such inference problems, and provide some examples of inferring unobservable arrival rates of packets on each flow from measurement of the aggregated-flows. Our method is applicable to the cases not covered by the existing methods for the OD traffic matrix inference. We also show simulation results, which indicate potential of our approach.