Error Estimating Codes with Constant Overhead: A Random Walk Approach

The paper studies the construction of error-estimation-codes (EEC), which estimate the bit-error-rate (BER) of packet transmissions. The concept of EEC was first proposed by Chen et.al in SIGCOMM 2010. In the same work group-sampling-error-estimation-codes (GSEEC) were constructed. Assuming the packet length is n, GSEEC requires communication overhead O(log(n)) and coding complexity O(n) to reliably estimate BER. In this paper, random walk based error-estimation-codes (RAKEE) are proposed, which are able to achieve constant communication overhead O(1) and linear coding complexity O(n). In the end of the paper, numerical experiments is shown to support our theoretical analysis.