Flow Byte Sizes Estimation from Simple Random Packet Sampling

The flow byte sizes is an important metric for network measurement. Previous work on estimating the flow size distribution (in bytes) has been focus on improving sampling technique to increase measurement accuracy. In this paper, we present an algorithm of flow byte sizes estimation based on random packet sampling. Our algorithm first obtains a maximum likelihood estimator of flow length using the TCP protocol information. After that the estimation of the flow byte sizes is accomplished through a linear regression model that relies on the flow length information previously obtained. Experimental results show that our approach is effective enough to capture the network traffic characteristics.