Inference of flow statistics via packet sampling in the internet

We show in this note that by deterministic packet sampling, the tail of the distribution of the original flow size can be obtained by rescaling that of the sampled flow size. To recover information on the flow size distribution lost through packet sampling, we propose a parametric method based on measurements from different backbone IP networks. This method allows us to recover the complete flow size distribution and has successfully been tested by using a real ADSL traffic trace.