Efficient Algorithms for Large-Scale Topology Discovery

Fri, 04/20/2007 - 10:48 by Benoit Donnet

Abstract

There is a growing interest in discovery of internet topology at the interface level. A new generation of highly distributed measurement systems is currently being deployed. Unfortunately, the research community has not examined the problem of how to perform such measurements efficiently and in a network-friendly manner. In this paper we make two contributions toward that end. First, we show that standard topology discovery methods (e.g., skitter) are quite inefficient, repeatedly probing the same interfaces. This is a concern, because when scaled up, such methods will generate so much traffic that they will begin to resemble DDoS attacks. We measure two kinds of redundancy in probing (intra- and inter-monitor) and show that both kinds are important. We show that straightforward approaches to addressing these two kinds of redundancy must take opposite tacks, and are thus fundamentally in conflict. Our second contribution is to propose and evaluate Doubletree, an algorithm that reduces both types of redundancy simultaneously on routers and end systems. The key ideas are to exploit the tree-like structure of routes to and from a single point in order to guide when to stop probing, and to probe each path by starting near its midpoint. Our results show that Doubletree can reduce both types of measurement load on the network dramatically, while permitting discovery of nearly the same set of nodes and links.

Authors
B. Donnet, P. Raoult, T. Friedman and M. Crovella
Source
Proc. ACM SIGMETRICS, Banff, Canada, Jun. 2005.
Notes
See also the traceroute@home project: http://trhome.sourceforge.net
Full text
pdf   (255.28 KB)
Slides
pdf   (1.16 MB)
Cite it
BibTex
Copyright
See here

IEEE Copyright Notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

ACM Copyright Notice: Copyright 1999 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page or intial screen of the document. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept., ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.

Springer-Verlag LNCS Copyright Notice: The copyright of these contributions has been transferred to Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York. The copyright transfer covers the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the contribution, including reprints, translations, photographic reproductions, microform, electronic form (offline, online), or any other reproductions of similar nature. Online available from Springer-Verlag LNCS series.