A comparative study of different heavy tail index estimators of the flow size from sampled data

In this article, we address the problem of estimating the tail parameter of a flow size distribution from sampled packet traffic. Based on synthetic data, we perform a systematic comparison of several estimators proposed in the literature. In the course, we propose a variant to an existing method which takes into account some statistical a priori on the expected distribution. This adapted estimator shows a significantly improved performance, as compared to the others.