Detection of time-varying flows in wireless networks

The problem of detecting the presence of time-varying flows in multi-hop wireless networks is considered. In particular, from transmission timing measurements, a test is constructed to determine whether there is a flow of data packets between a pair of nodes. It is assumed that the packet flows may have time-varying (piecewise constant) flow rates. First, a timing-based detector is proposed to detect a flow in the given measurements, and its performance analysis follows. Then, based on the detector, a sliding window technique is proposed for continuous monitoring. The techniques are tested using the MSN Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic and the synthetic Poisson traffic.