International Journal of Computer Science Trends and Technology (IJCST) Volume 5 Issue 4, Jul Aug 2017

RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS

Network Monitoring: Key Aspects in Packet Loss and its

Measurements
B Bindu Sahitya Devi [1], G Nageswara Rao [2]
Department of IT [1]
Department of CSE [2]
AITAM, Tekkali
Andhrapradesh, India

ABSTRACT
Networks involves with vast complications like establishment of network, maintenance of network and finally
monitoring of network. Establishment and maintenance may achieve with some fuss, as it is part of IT infrastructure
management system. But, when it comes to monitoring it is a 24*7 job and we need to do monitoring
locally and remotely too. The h a r d s h i p I f o u n d here is to involve in network monitoring with respect to FCAPS.
The loss of packets should be significantly identified. For that there is a need of appropriate diagnosis
methodology for packet loss which was happened mostly at network elements and intermediate elements. So,
in this paper we mentioned the goodness of network monitoring and those tools and methodologies.
Keywords : IT infrastructure management system, FCAPS, Packet Loss.

I. INTRODUCTION
Network Monitoring is a combination of art and science,
we need to turn out every leaf of the tree, to show something
went wrong or everything is fantastic. Despite efforts of net-
work engineers and operators to limit loss, it will probably
never be eliminated due to the intrinsic dynamics and scaling
proper-ties of traffic in packet switched network [1]. To
discuss about key factors of Network Monitoring packet loss
measurement is holding a major role. Quality is proportional
to testing [2]. Reasons for packet loss: 1. Congestion(Link
congestion) 2. Device performance (Router, Switch, etc.) 3.
Software issues on Network device. 4. Faulty hardware and
cabling.
1. Link Congestion
Data must forward via different vendors devices and cables
along its trip across the network. If one of these links is at
full capacity when data arrives, then it must wait its turn
before being sent across the probe. If a network device is
falling far behind, it wont have queue, so it does the only
thing it can, which is to discard packet. The users application
realizes that a packet was lost, slows down its transfer
speed, and re-transmits the data. If this was a downloading a
file, email, or non real-time data transfer, the effect will be
minimal as long as the packet loss doesnt continue to happen.
The effect is very noticeable to the users. If you are on a
phone call and the network loses some data, there is no time
to resend the packets since it is a real-time conversation. The
user will typically hear breaks in the audio during small
packet loss, and potentially lose the phone call if the packet
loss is severe. Another critical application that has a low
threshold for packet loss is video conferencing. If data is
lost between the two end points, the video will show artifacts
and the audio will be distorted. Solution There are two main
ways to help reduce the effect of packet loss due to network
congestion: Increase the bandwidth of the congested link(s).
Implement Quality of Service (QoS) to give priority to real-
time traffic. This will not help the congestion of the link,
but it can give priority to applications like speech or video
which lowers drop.
2. Device Performance
If bandwidth is adequate, you can still face an issue if your
router/switch/firewall is not able to keep up with the traffic.
Lets take a scenario where you recently upgraded a link
from 10Gb to 15Gb because traffic reports show that you
were at full capacity during peak hours of the day. After the
upgrade, your charts show the bandwidth going up to 1.5GB,
but you are still experiencing network performance issues.
The issue could be that the device is not able to keep up with
the traffic, and you have hit the maximum throughput your
hardware can provide.
The traffic is reaching the device, but the devices CPU or
memory is maxed out and not able to handle extra traffic.
This results in packet loss for all traffic that is beyond the
capacity of the box. Solution You must replace the hardware
with a new appliance that can handle your maximum
throughput, or potentially cluster additional hardware to
increase your throughput.
3. Software issues (bugs) on a network device

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 International Journal of Computer Science Trends and Technology (IJCST) Volume 5 Issue 4, Jul Aug 2017
Bugs may cause new issues to not work at all when
you install them, or can go undetected for a while before
you may notice performance issues of firmware. Once
the performance issue is detected and troubleshooting has
started, these types of issues are usually found using system
logs and packet captures. Solution One must upgrade the
software on the specific device.
4. Faulty Hardware or Cabling
Traffic report shows that your links are not over-utilized,
and the hardware utilization is within specification. The
next common issue that can lead to drops would be a physical
component that is malfunctioning. If hardware is not
working properly, it will usually lead to error messages being
seen on the console of the device or within system logs. If
there is a link problem, that will be seen as errors on an
interface. This can be seen on both copper cabling and fiber
optic. Solution hardware can be exchanged, or the fault link
must be repaired. These are the most common reasons for
packet loss on a network, but there are many other
reasons that can contribute to packet drops. The best way to
determine the root cause is through a network assessment
and detailed troubleshooting.
Fig. 1. Network Elemments
ISSN: 2347-8578 www.ijcstjournal.org
II. ANALYSIS
Even though we found the probable reasons, the important
issue is how much? It means how much packet loss is going
on? So, we need a standard to see the how much loss is
going on. To do so, a deep study is recommended for packet
loss measurement. Another important is Where to measure?
Either locally or remotely (RMON)? There have been many
studies of packet loss behavior in the Internet. Bolot [3] and
Paxson [4] evaluated end-to-end probe measurements and
reported characteristics of packet loss over a selection of
paths in the wide area We sent some SNMP packets across a
network between manger and agent , the packet going across a
LAN, opens it and analyze it. This passive operation does
nothing to the packets, it will continue on to their
destinations.
Fig. 2. Router Functional Diagram
This way is Network Monitoring. In traditional model of
host configuration manager must monitor the whole
network, this leads N:1 ratio of clients to the manager.
icontroller = i1 + i2 + i3 + ... in
irepair = Cs /N
Where,
Cs= Capacity of controller
N = Number of Nodes
p
if ail = iupdate Cs /C (Nthreshold ) = 0
where
Nthreshold = Maximum network size.
Fig. 3. Network Controller
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 International Journal of Computer Science Trends and Technology (IJCST) Volume 5 Issue 4, Jul Aug 2017
In the absence of routers bridges can transmit data in fast
manner. But router ought to do both routing facility and
network layer functions.
In OAMP network monitoring (data gathering and anal- ysis)
will come under network administration. A closely related
issue is the fact that loss is typically a rare event in the
Internet [5]. Where as network operations center deals with
FCAPS.
Routers and Gateways form the backbone of networking.
Routers permit loops in the topology and thus are more
universal than bridges. That loops enable balancing of traffic
as well as self-healing of network in the case of link or
router failure. In the absence of routers bridges can transmit
data in fast manner. But router ought to do both routing
facility and network layer functions. Brouter is device which
can act both bridge and a router. Packet loss can happen
around brouter also.
To find loss or faults in intermediate level such as routers
some traps were facilitated like cold start, link down, TCP
connection close, etc.. To analyze data some information is
very essential like interface state (UP/DOWN), hardware and
IP address, IP state (forwarding gateway/Not), IPTTL,
IPNextHopAddress, IP route age and mask, TCP state,
neighbor state, SNMP trap, etc.. Here, mostly, in practice,
SNMP is only to detect problems not to repair them. So
SNMP need on-board intelligence like cfengine and PIKT.
Fig. 3. Network Controller
ISSN: 2347-8578 www.ijcstjournal.org
To support FCAPS, Netmon from windows, also captures all
traffic, it decode some proprietary Microsoft network
traffic, Microsoft RPC services that communicate using
named pipes over windows NT networking. It covers 1.
Network Address 2. Frames send 3. Frames received 4.
Bytes send 5. Bytes received 6. Directed frames send 7.
Multicast sent 8. Broadcast sent Most network based
intrusion detection systems will also detect these instances of
Netmon.
III. PACKET LOSS MEASUREMENT
TECHNIQUES
The main drawback of passive monitoring is that it requires
full access to network resources (e.g. routers, SNMP
utilization) otherwise it is impossible to combine into end-
toned Packet. For this reason Active Probing is becoming the
default means of network measurement and a considerable
amount of recent work has concentrated on developing
techniques for active probing. Active measurement by probing
is a means by which testing packets (probes) are sent into the
network. The network properties/performance are indirect by
either measuring the responses to a stimulus probe from the
network or by collecting the result at the remote receiving
end.
BADABING TOOL
Using the BADABING Tool we can measure the packet
loss more accurately than before. Thus we can find the
networks performance by calculating the packet loss. By
finding the networks performance we can use the network
according to our needs. Thus we can evaluate the network
performance by calculating the packet loss. We can measure
packet loss in military networks, hospital networks[10].
We begin by using our laboratory testbed to evaluate the
capabilities of simple Poisson-modulated loss probe mea-
surements using the ZING tool [6]. ZING measures packet
delay and loss in one direction on an end-to-end path.
The ZING sender emits UDP probe packets at Poisson-
modulated intervals with timestamps and unique sequence
numbers and the receiver logs the probe packet arrivals [7].
Passive Measurement is a means of tracking the perfor-
mance and behavior of packet streams by measuring the
user load without creating new or modifying actual load. It is
implemented by incorporating additional intelligence into
network devices to enable them to identify and record the
characteristics and quantity of the packets that flow through
them. List of tools available for us are Bit or packet rates
Packet timing / inter-arrival timing Traffic / protocol mixes
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 International Journal of Computer Science Trends and Technology (IJCST) Volume 5 Issue 4, Jul Aug 2017
IV. CONCLUSION
Here, we categorize the methodologies of packet loss
measurement along with the reasons of packet loss and how
network elements and intermediate elements will face the
challenges and also involve in Network Monitoring. There is
a need of a hybrid policy to find packet loss and some
appropriate steps to improve the network performance.
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ISSN: 2347-8578 www.ijcstjournal.org
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