Techniques for flow inversion on sampled data

The distribution of flow sizes is a quantity of interest fundamental to traffic engineering and network modelling and only likely to become more important in the future. The recovery of the flow-length distribution from (sampled) packet data is referred to as flow-inversion. Traditional packet sampling methods cause distortions in a recovered distribution of flow-length. We propose an improved method for inverting data sampled using the technique known as sample-and-hold. We show that the technique improves upon existing inversion techniques illustrated using both real and artificial data sets. The technique described may have applications to other inversion problems.