Accuracy of third-party cloud availability estimation through ICMP

Third-party measurements of cloud availability are needed as a checkpoint of cloud providers' quality statements, and ICMP has been proposed to carry on such measurements. Simple ICMP-based measurement schemes, however, provide a poor discrimination between false outages and true cloud outages, unless the cloud outage probability is quite higher than the packet loss rate incurred by probing packets due to network failures. The use of a closely spaced sequence of probing instances, proposed to get rid of false outages, is ineffective for the purpose, unless the cloud itself is free of unavailability glitches.