Patent attributes
The invention provides a packet loss detection system that in near-real time detects packet loss and reports the identities of the lost packets. The identities of the lost packets are based on a set of packet-specific information that includes five-tuple flow information of the packet and other unique packet identifiers. A set of meters are placed at various vantage points in the network, each meter generates digests summarizing all the traffic passing through itself. The digests are exported to a collector/analyzer, which decodes the digests and performs an analysis to detect packet losses and to determine the lost packets' identities. The collector compares between the traffic digests generated by all the meters surrounding the segment. Mismatches among the digests indicate packet losses. The collector restores the identifiers of the lost packets by further decoding the mismatches between the digests.
