Realistic Passive Packet Loss Measurement for High-Speed Networks

Realistic and accurate packet loss measurement of production traffic has been challenging, since the frequently-used active monitoring approaches using probe packets cannot capture the packet loss experienced by the traffic of individual user applications. In this paper, we present a new approach for the accurate measurement of the packet loss rate faced by actual production traffic based on passive network monitoring. In contrast to previous work, our method is able to pinpoint the packet loss rate experienced by the individual traffic flows of concurrently running applications. Experimental results suggest that our approach measures packet loss with 100% accuracy for network speeds as high as 12 Gbit/s, while traditional ICMP-based approaches were usually much less accurate. We also report experiences from a real-world deployment of our method in several 10 Gbit/s links of European research networks, where it has been successfully operational for several months.