Implementation and experimental evaluation of a simple packet rate estimator

Abstract This paper implements and evaluates experimentally the performance of a simple packet rate estimator that can be considerably useful in predicting the rate of incoming traffic to a network host. The quality and performance of the estimator are evaluated experimentally in terms of cost, accuracy, agility, and stability. Considerable details and guidance are given on how to implement the estimator in Linux and also how to generate highly fluctuating traffic using publicly available traffic generators. The Linux code of the estimator was written in a way to minimize computational overhead by using shift operations and thus avoiding the CPU expensive operations of multiplication and division. The code is also written to be generic enough so it can be easily implemented in other operation systems. The paper also investigates experimentally the performance impact under two key estimator's parameters (viz. time-window size and weighting factor).