• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.3150-3171
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• 2018

In this paper, a heuristic method that leverages packet traces captured at the entire boarder of an ISP to distinguish and estimate the overall packet loss within an ISP's management domain (Intra_Path_Loss) and that in the outside Internet (Inter_Path_Loss) is proposed. Our method is inspired by that packet losses happened at different locations will cause different TCP sequence number patterns at the border of an ISP. Thereby, we leverage these TCP sequence number patterns to build a series of heuristic rules to estimate Intra_Path_Loss and Inter_Path_Loss, respectively. We do this work with an eye towards showing that the overall packet losses defined and estimated in this paper can provide the operators with some valuable information to help them precisely grasp the overall performance of network paths and narrow down the range of network anomalies. The proposed method is rigorously validated with simulations, and finally the results from a regional academic network JSERNET verify its effectiveness and practicability.