Measurement of packet loss probability by optimal design of packet probing experiments

Packet level measurement is now critical to many aspects of broadband networking, e.g. for guaranteeing Service Level Agreements, facilitating measurement-based admission control algorithms, and performing network tomography. Because it is often impossible to measure all the data passing across a network, the most widely used method of measurement works by injecting probe packets. The probes provide samples of the packet loss and delay, and from these samples the loss and delay performance of the traffic as a whole can be deduced. However measuring performance like this is prone to errors. Recent work has shown that some of these errors are minimized by using a gamma renewal process as the optimal pattern for the time instants at which to inject probes. This leaves the best rate at which to inject probes as the key unsolved problem, and we address this here by using the statistical principles of the Design of Experiments. The experimental design approach allows us