Performance evaluation and comparison of four network packet rate estimators

This paper presents and compares the performance of three popular packet rate estimators used in predicting the rate of incoming traffic to a network host. The paper proposes a fourth and novel packet rate estimator. Unlike other estimators, the proposed estimator is cost effective as its computation is simple and is not performed upon the arrival of every incoming packet. We evaluate and compare the quality and performance of all estimators in terms of accuracy, agility, stability, and cost. The performance evaluation is primarily conducted by using discrete-event simulation. Our simulation accounts for constant traffic as well as synthesized bursty traffic with empirical packet sizes. We also implement and measure the actual computational cost of two time-window based estimators. The cost is measured in terms of consumed CPU cycles for packet and bit rate estimations. In addition, we investigate how to optimize the performance of our proposed estimator by examining the impact of tuning its key configurable estimation parameters.