Estimation of flow distributions tails from sampled traffic

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the tails of flow duration and size distributions under various sampling methods. For each method the asymptotic equivalence between the flow duration distribution tail and the sampled flow quantities is derived, assuming that the flow process follows a simplified probabilistic model. The analysis is also extended to the flow size distribution tail. The adequacy of the results to estimate the distributions tails is checked against a real Internet trace.