Now a day's web services become key aspect of life. Unfortunately there are several threats to these services. These threats are phishing, e-mail borne viruses, Trojan horse programs, Denial of Service etc. Among of them Distributed Denial of Service attack is a strong and more energetic attack on the Internet. Launching of DDoS attack is an explicit attempt to exhaust the resources of server to prevent legitimate users to access services. The common flooding DDoS attacks can be detected and mitigated by some mechanisms easily cause of the characteristics as flow rate, size of attack packets, but still it is difficult to detect and identifies the Low-Rate DoS attack because the attacker periodically send short burst packets which behave as legitimate traffic to the server. The attack is only detected when the server goes down. So an efficient detection system is required which effectively Characterize the legitimate and attack traffic to detect the attack and stop it to mitigate the effect of these sort of threats. In this article we proposed a complete framework for "Characterization, Detection and Mitigation of Low-Rate DoS Attacks" which effectively characterize the flows as attack or legitimate, detects the low-rate DoS attack on the basis of characteristics of low rate and mitigate the effect of this by stopping the attack flow near the source. The effectiveness of this approach have validated by simulation in ns-2, with Shell scripting, on a Linux platform.