Time-varying network link loss rate tracking from unicast end-to-end measurements

Time-varying network link loss rate is a useful information for network managers to discover and locate the network link failures. This paper proposes a method to track time-varying network link loss rates from unicast end-to-end measurements. The method first trains a state transition matrix to capture the spatio-temporal characters of packet link transmission probabilities by sending end-to-end probe packets and then estimates the time-varying link loss rates using the state transition matrix and the end-to-end measurements obtained from background traffic (the existed packets in network). We also introduce a validation step to check and retrain the state transition matrix in order to ensure the accuracy of the state transition matrix. Our method is capable of tracking the variation of link loss rates without incessantly sending probe packets, which is very feasible for many practical applications. The ns-2 simulation results show the good performance of our method.