Framework for Real-Time Monitoring of Packet Loss Caused by Network Congestion

Network congestion induces performance degradation and increases the uncertainty of service delivery, so it is essential to monitor it in real time. In this paper, we discuss the requirements of real-time monitoring of packet loss caused by congestion, present the problems and challenges faced by existing measurement techniques in monitoring congestion induced packet loss, and propose a comprehensive packet loss monitoring framework. The proposed framework is described in detail and its realizability is demonstrated. The proposed scheme is capable to not only determine the time and location of packet loss occurrence, make the accurate statistics of discarded packets, parse what traffic flows are contained in discarded packets and identify what traffic flows lead to microburst, but also obtain accurate packet loss ratio results with zero error. More importantly, our proposed scheme can achieve little or even no interference to network, and is applicable to any data plane without modifying the forwarding chip and packet header as existing measurement methods do. Experimental results have verified the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. Furthermore, we present three typical application scenarios to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework