A paper I skimmed.

It is about error in measurements done in a switch. There are four properties discussed:

  1. Timing. The timestamp of packets traced.
  2. Loss. The packets missed by the packet capture.
  3. Gain. The packets did not exist but captured. These packets are called phantoms by the paper. Gain occurs because switch may replicate a packet when forwarding it. For example, when a packet flood to more than one port, and the measurement is done on multiple output ports, more than one event are recorded for one packet forwarding event.
  4. Layout. Identification of topological components, such as whether traffic is intra- or inter-subnet; or the broadcast domain of an IP subnet; or detecting hidden switches.

Bibliographic data

@inproceedings{
   title = "On Calibrating Enterprise Switch Measurements",
   author = "Boris Nechaev and Mark Allman and Vern Paxson and Andrei Gurtov",
   booktitle = "Proc. IMC'09",
   month = "November 4-6",
   year = "2009",
   address = "Chicago, Illinois, USA",
}