The estimation error of adaptive deterministic packet marking

This paper is concerned with problem of signalling congestion link price information to a receiver using single bit marks. An efficient method was presented in [1] which exploits side information in the IPid field of the IP header to allow the maximum price on a flow’s path to be estimated. In this paper we provide analysis to support the claim that the scheme can track a changing price. We consider a random walk model for the price, and provide a weak convergence result showing that the squared error (normalized by the drift) is asymptotically exponentially distributed, as the drift tends to zero.