Experimental Evaluation of Duplicate Insensitive Counting Algorithms

Online and realtime counting and estimating the cardinality of sets is highly desirable for a large variety of applications, representing a foundational block for the efficient deployment and access of emerging Internet scale information systems. In this work we implement three well known duplicate insensitive counting algorithms and evaluate their performance in a testbed of resource-limited commercial off-the-shelf hardware devices. We focus on devices that can be used in wireless mobile and sensor applications and evaluate the memory complexity, time complexity and absolute error of the algorithms under different realistic scenario. Our findings indicate the suitability of each algorithm depending on the application characteristics.