Passive Packet Loss Measurement Employing the IP Packet Feature Extraction Technique

Performance measurements are indispensable for managing the Internet. Among the performance measurement techniques known, passive measurement is attractive because of its accuracy; user traffic is observed without inserting additional test traffic. However, the technique is handicapped by its large storage and bandwidth costs. This paper proposes a passive packet loss measurement technique that effectively avoids the difficulty of the conventional passive measurement approaches. Its key advance is utilizing the packet feature computed by a hash function. Since the feature can identify a packet with a short length of data, it becomes possible to greatly decrease the storage and bandwidth costs of passive measurements. The paper details the measurement procedure and assesses the design parameters used in the method. In addition, the validity of the proposed method is confirmed through experiments. The experiments also show the advantage of the method over the conventional active measurement. key words: Internet, performance, passive measurement, packet loss