Computational Weight of Network Traffic Sampling Techniques

Abstract

Within network measurement context, traffic sampling has been targeted as a promising solution to cope with the huge amount of traffic traversing network devices as only a subset of packets is elected for analysis. Although this brings an evident advantage to measurement overhead, the computational burden of performing sampling tasks in network equipment may overshadow the potential benefits of sampling. Attending that sampling techniques evince distinct temporal and spatial characteristics in handling traffic, this paper is focused on studying the computational weight of current and emerging techniques in terms of memory consumption, CPU load and data volume. Furthermore, the accuracy of these techniques in estimating network parameters such as throughput is evaluated. A sampling framework has also been implemented in order to provide a versatile and fair platform for carrying out the testing and comparison process.