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Full Paper Proc. of Int. Conf. on Advances in Computer Engineering 2012

A Stable and Agile Rate Estimation Technique Mary Looney1, Oliver Gough1 1

Department of Electronic Engineering, Cork Institute of Technology, Cork, Ireland Email: {mary.looney, oliver.gough} @cit.ie traditionally a weight based estimator but may be used for rate estimation if its configurable weight translates into a time window [3]. Although these algorithms have been widely used as rate estimation techniques, they suffer from one main limitation. I.e. they can only be configured to be either agile or stable rate estimators. They cannot be configured to be both agile and stable at the same instance. Hence their performance is dependent on a configurable parameter which dictates the agility or stability of the filter [1, 4]. To overcome this drawback, the configurable parameter could be adaptively adjusted, however this would only be applicable to traffic that tends to change quite smoothly. Hence, a rate estimation technique known as the flip-flop filter was proposed in [4] and suggests using two rate estimation techniques (i.e. TSW filters) where one is configured to be an agile filter and the other is configured to be stable. A controller is used to determine which output should be chosen as the estimated rate. Although, this approach has shown to be successful in providing both agile and stable estimated rates, quantitative measures of agility and stability have not been discussed. Additionally, the flip-flop uses a controller based on the 3sigma rule which assumes that the sample population it works with is normally distributed. Hence, this technique may not be applicable to more realistic heavy tailed distributions. The purpose of this paper is therefore to quantitatively analyse the flip-flop filter in terms of accuracy, agility and stability. Additionally, it proposes a rate estimation technique known as SARE (Stable Agile Rate Estimator) that is similar to the flip-flop filter but differs in its use of filters and controller to allow for more stable and agile results. As both techniques are composed of TSW or EWMA filters we also investigate the ability of these single estimators in producing agile, stable and accurate results. The paper is organised as follows: Section II investigates existing rate estimation techniques. Section III introduces the proposed rate estimation technique, SARE. Section IV presents simulation analysis investigating the proposed approach in comparison to the flip-flop filter as well as investigating the TSW and EWMA algorithms in terms of accuracy, agility, stability and cost. The paper concludes in Section V.

Abstract—Traffic rate estimation is an essential part of traffic management and control in producing Quality of Service (QoS) enabled networks. Several rate estimation techniques have been proposed for efficient traffic rate estimation. Ideally, these estimators should be agile, stable and accurate to track changes in the traffic rate quickly but ignore short term changes due to traffic behaviour to produce accurate results. However, a single rate estimator cannot always be configured to be both agile and stable. In this paper we propose a rate estimation algorithm that uses two rate estimation techniques in a flip-flop based approach to enable it to be agile in measuring the actual changes of traffic in a timely and accurate manner as well as being stable in ignoring short term variations of the traffic. Investigation of existing TSW and EWMA algorithms is performed to determine those that work best with the proposed estimator in terms of agility and stability. Simulation analysis is used to analyse the performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison to that of an existing flip-flop filter. Quantitative results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed estimator over that of the existing flip-flop filter in being an agile, stable and accurate rate estimation technique. Index Terms— Rate Estimation, Metering, Flip-flop filter

I. INTRODUCTION Traffic rate estimation is an integral part of many high speed network services and components. These real time estimations are required for algorithms such as traffic management, conditioning, scheduling, monitoring and admission control. Due to the inherent bursty nature of Internet traffic, traffic rate estimation is not always an easy task to perform. Short term changes may obscure output results or a change in traffic rate may not always be detected easily. Hence, a rate estimator is required to be accurate, agile, stable and cost effective [1]. An accurate rate estimator should provide an estimated rate close to that of the actual rate. An agile rate estimator should track the changes in the actual data rate of the traffic in a timely and accurate manner. A stable rate estimator should ignore short term changes in traffic behaviour that are natural to the traffic. A cost effective estimator should be fast and simple and should not require a lot of computational power in processing samples of data or large memory constraints in storing data. However, not all existing rate estimation techniques are capable of satisfying all of these characteristics [1]. Various rate estimation techniques are in existence and it is the TSW and EWMA filters that are the most widely known recursive rate estimation techniques. The TSW rate estimator was proposed in [2] to act as a profile meter of a Traffic Conditioning technique and was subsequently specified in RFC 2859[3] as a rate estimation technique. The EWMA is Š 2012 ACEEE DOI: 02.ACE.2012.03. 4

II. RATE ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES As already mentioned, the TSW and EWMA rate estimation techniques are the most commonly used recursive rate estimators. We will now discuss these estimators and variations of these algorithms in terms of being accurate, agile, stabile and cost effective estimators. A. TSW Filter The TSW was designed to eliminate dependency on the 1


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