Queen: Estimating Packet Loss Rate between Arbitrary Internet Hosts

Estimate of packet-loss rates between arbitrary Internet hosts is critical for many large-scale distributed applications, including overlay routing, P2P media streaming, VoIP, and edge-server location in CDNs. iPlane has been recently proposed to estimate delay, packet-loss rates, and bandwidth between arbitrary hosts [1]. To our knowledge, iPlane is the only published technique for estimating loss rates between arbitrary Internet hosts. In this paper, we present Queen, a new methodology for estimating packet-loss rates between arbitrary hosts. Queen, extending the King [2] methodology for estimating delay, takes advantage of the open recursive DNS name servers. Queen requires neither additional infrastructure deployment nor control of the DNS recursive servers. After describing the methodology, we present an extensive measurement validation of Queen’s accuracy. Our validation shows that Queen’s accuracy is reasonably high and, in particular, significantly better than that of iPlane for packet-loss rate estimation.