Packet Sampling for Network Monitoring

In this paper, the emphasis is placed on various packet sampling methods and their application to network monitoring. The paper presents the motivations for packet sampling on high-speed network links. The paper gives an overview of all known packet sampling techniques, point out their strengths and weaknesses in terms of reliability and accuracy in the estimation in different network traffic parameters. The paper also provides more details about the adaptive packet sampling, as a way to increase this accuracy. One of the key objectives of the study is to gain some insight about the feasibility of the packet sampling in context of network anomaly detection. It was proven that packet sampling provides reliable estimates in traffic monitoring applications.