Limitations for Measuring Packet Loss Probability Using Active Probing Techniques

Performance measurement of packet (e.g. managed IP) networks is a vital element in the commercial viability of broadband networking. Active measurement techniques in which probe packets are injected into the network have a great potential as the probes can be accessed across network boundaries. We apply our simulation results to show that when using probing packets the same size as the data packets the average time until a probe is lost due to an overflowing buffer can be very large and may make probe based SLA monitoring extremely difficult. Furthermore, this paper also concentrates on the trade-off between accuracy and packet probing overhead.