Loss Tomography in General Topology

Abstract

Although there are a few works reported in the literature considering loss tomography in the general topology, there is few well established result since all of them rely either on simulations or on experiments that have many random factors affecting the outcome. To improve the situation, we address a number of issues in this paper that include a maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for the general topology, the statistical properties of the MLE, the statistical properties of a frequently referred estimator called the moving variance and weighted average (MVWA), and a renewed MVWA that removes the restriction of knowing variance in advance from the MVWA. The statistical properties covers minimum-variance unbiasedness, efficiency, and variances of the estimates obtained by the estimators. Given the properties, we can evaluate the estimators without the need of simulations. To verify the properties, a simulation study is conducted that confirms the accuracy of the findings.